The 1970 song Elton John wanted to play forever: “Better every time”
Even after Elton John has retired from the road, it seems that he doesn’t want to slow down any time soon.
He loved the idea of making music at every opportunity, and while he might not want to commit to a full tour or anything, hearing him working off of new artists like Brandi Carlile or Gorillaz was at least proof that he had a lot more gas in the tank than being a nostalgia act every time he played. But when you look at his track record for classics, John knew that his golden oldies hadn’t lost their lustre even after being played for over half a century at this point.
But John’s way with melody wouldn’t have been possible without Bernie Taupin. Taupin might have been the one who only threw in the lyrics for John to put his music over, but it was about more than just writing nonsense. He wrote massive stories and set up specific images in your mind that John was able to run with the minute that he laid eyes on tracks like ‘Tiny Dancer’ or ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’.
It’s not the kind of creative partnership that most people expect when they look at their favourite rock musicians, but John always felt natural when working off of Taupin’s words. He didn’t have to necessarily agree with everything that he said in any one of his songs, but as long as the lyrics had the right sibilance and rolled off the tongue, he could turn even the dopiest lyric sheet into something that sounded classic.
Sometimes there would be songs that he didn’t want to return to, like ‘Crocodile Rock’, but John figured that some songs were bound to last well after he left this Earth. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is already full of timeless melodies, and Captain Fantastic was a love letter to the friendship that he and Taupin had over the years, but every songwriter always remembers the first time they really knocked it out of the park.
And while John had a lot of false starts throughout his career, ‘Your Song’ is really ground zero for where his career begins. There were a lot of undiscovered gems on his debut record, but when you heard that opening piano figure coming in alongside Taupin’s beautiful love story, it sounded like the song had always existed and John just happened to be the one to put it onto tape.
The song was an absolute monster hit when it first came out, and while John would have been tired of it by now, he knew that nothing could dull its power whenever he performed it live, saying, “What can I say, it’s a perfect song. It gets better every time I sing it. I remember writing it at my parents’ apartment in North London, and Bernie giving me the lyrics, sitting down at the piano and looking at it and going, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a great lyric, I can’t f—k this one up.’ It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in, and we both knew.”
But beyond being a great song, ‘Your Song’ set the bar for what John was supposed to be doing for the rest of his career. He didn’t have time to crowd out any of his albums with filler, and throughout his classic run, there are tunes like ‘Levon’ that didn’t get as much attention but are as well-written as anything else that he ever made.
Other songwriters have tried their hand at getting introspective and writing about the more sentimental side of themselves, but John and Taupin wrote the kind of tunes that seems to transcend time. You could be playing it on a piano by yourself or hearing it as elevator music in a Holiday Inn, and in whatever context, it’s always going to be the perfect song for any moment.
