The one person Elton John called the musical love of his life: “My little soulmate”
Elton John didn’t ever think that he was going to be one of the biggest artists in the world.
That was reserved for the true showmen of the world, and even if he could hold his own with the rest of Bluesology, he was never going to be one of those superstars if he stayed as Ol’ Reggie Dwight for the rest of his career. He needed that one extra bit of magic, and sometimes it took the right people to help kick things into high gear.
But John wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to be telling all of his personal feelings in all of his songs. He had a real affinity for people who could do that, but when looking at his own compositions, he wasn’t exactly going to give Bob Dylan a run for his money. He needed someone who was well-versed in what great rock and roll lyrics should be, and when he first got turned on to Bernie Taupin’s writing by complete accident, he realised that he had found more than just a collaborator.
Taupin was someone with whom he could be completely honest, and a lot of the best pieces of music that they made together were about John making the perfect melody to suit what he was singing. Then again, the kind of partnership that they had isn’t the kind you’d usually find in one of the greatest songwriting duos of their generation.
The idea of someone writing lyrics and the musician writing the melody underneath it feels like something that was ripped off the Broadway stage, but it actually suits their work quite well. Not every one of their albums needed to be some grand rock and roll epic, and even when they were working on more downtempo affairs like Tumbleweed Connection, John had the perfect sixth sense when it came time to set the scene for whatever Western-style prose that Taupin gave him.
And when they finally reached the top of the mountain, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy were like them, getting to tell their own story after years of slaving away. There are plenty of characters littered throughout every one of their songs, but every tune on this record was like telling their autobiography, whether that’s the down and out moments like ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ or when they were finally becoming superstars on the title track.
Taupin didn’t have to say how much he cared about John on every single song that he wrote, but their collaboration on ‘We All Fall in Love Sometimes’ is probably the closest thing to a love letter as they could have written each other, saying, “I cry when I sing this song, because I was in love with Bernie, not in a sexual way, but because he was the person I was looking for my entire life, my little soulmate.”
Adding, “We’d come so far, and we were still very naive. I was gay by that time, and he was married, but he was a person that, more than anything, I loved, and the relationship we had was so odd, because it was not tied at the hip.”
But they didn’t need to be a constant in each other’s lives to have that kind of connection. Everyone tends to have those few friends who can understand what they’re going through, even if they haven’t talked to them for years on end, and even when Taupin took a break from working with John on a few of his albums, hearing them come back together for tunes like ‘I’m Still Standing’ made it seem like their signature magic started all over again.
So while John did have his own feelings about no one understanding him when he first began writing music, he knew that he always had a friend in Taupin. Everyone as big as John needed that foundation to stand on, and while Taupin was never going to go out onstage by any stretch, he was only happy to have written lines that would go down in history as one of the best lyrics ever written.
