The musician Elton John said was of “extraordinarily high” quality
There are some artists who are technically incredible but widely underappreciated. It’s easy to fall into being a ‘musician’s musician’, meaning that their work is incredibly skilled and difficult but feels inaccessible to regular listeners, as they become more focused on wowing their peers than making a good hit. For Elton John, there was one musician who managed to do both, inspiring so many fellow players while still being one of the biggest stars around.
It could be argued that John himself managed that. As he cut his teeth playing in jazz bars, his piano playing is technically brilliant. His skills have been honed since he was a young boy, as he started on the instrument as a child. By the time he was an adult and ready to break into the music world, his ability to merge technicality with musicality, adding a honky-tonk pop flair to his playing, could wow musicians and music fans alike.
The key is to merge skill and talent in such a way that it becomes undeniable. It’s not enough to be doing difficult riffs or filling songs with intricately built high-production details; it has to be able to translate to a crowd with no musical knowledge. It’s not enough to be well-taught; a great musician has to also be well-versed in showmanship and writing catchy hits to hook the masses.
For John, one player had that down to a fine art: Prince. “I like to think that if you’re a real musician, you recognise quality when you see it,” John wrote in a foreword for a Prince biography, Prince and the Parade and Sign O’ the Times Era Studio Sessions: 1985 and 1986. “But you didn’t need to be a musician to recognise that in Prince. You had quality that was extraordinarily high. You just needed ears and eyes.”
He perfectly articulates the idea that Prince’s talent seemed to smack anyone around the face. It was an undeniable talent that couldn’t be contested. Even if someone wasn’t necessarily a fan of his music, there was no arguing that Prince was a supremely talented musician as a guitar player, producer, songwriter and performer.
He did it all. Prince’s story is a miraculous one of a musician seeming to have limitless potential from the very start and simply having to convince the world of that. He decided to prove that from the beginning as his debut album, For You, contained only one musician: Prince. For that 1978 record, he decided to start with a bang by proving to his label just how talented and capable he was. Across the album, he plays every single instrument, from drums and guitars to clarinets, synths, bongos and beyond.
But he didn’t stop there. Prince also produced the record, as he did with all of his albums from that moment on. He wrote every word, arranged and composed every note, and then played every sound. He was only 19 at the time.
From that debut, Prince’s talent only grew. Over the course of 39 studio albums and decades of sell-out shows, he proved himself to be a supreme talent. In many ways, he felt utterly peerless. The people who would have been considered on his level also joined the masses in being utterly awestruck by the musician. Elton John is one of them, with other names like Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell and Tom Petty all joining the masses who looked up to Prince.
