The 1983 song Elton John will always love singing: “It’s just great”
Elton John has his fair share of songs that really can be retired at this point.
The piano legend was more than happy to leave the stage for the final time after his festival performances in the 2020s, but the thought of him having to play a song like ‘Crocodile Rock’ over and over again wouldn’t have been all that enticing for him if he had the itch to perform again. But there are often those few songs that seem to be evergreen every single time that John got back into gear whenever he took to the road.
Then again, that doesn’t mean that Bernie Taupin had to necessarily be in love with everything that John was. Neither of them claimed to be on the same page with each other about absolutely everything, but you could tell that they were musical soulmates in more ways than one. John was looking for someone like Taupin all his life, and being able to put music to his words was everything that he could have asked for.
He didn’t necessarily relate to a song like ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ or ‘Tiny Dancer’ whenever he sang, but he was creating the music for those lines the same way that a director sets a scene in a film. John was using his piano to help paint the picture of what Taupin was getting at every single time he sang, but there were a few moments where the meaning of those songs changed just a little bit whenever he sang them live.
‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ is all about someone getting disillusioned with the idea of fame and wanting to go back home, and while John was having a ball singing and touring the world at the time, it does sound a lot more true to form to hear him sing the song after going on his final stretch of live dates. But if there’s one genre that could get to his heart greater than anything else, it was writing those melancholy tunes.
Some of the greatest songs in the Western world are based around heartache in some form or another, and everything from ‘Candle in the Wind’ to ‘Levon’ to ‘Rocketman’ are perfect encapsulation of what the lonely side of life looks like. And while ‘Funeral for a Friend’ was based around the kind of music John wanted to hear when he crosses over to the other side, the romantic angle on ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues’ was the perfect kind of lyric for him to sing.
He already had his own fair share of failed relationships in the past, but whereas Taupin thought the lyrics sounded a little bit dated a few years after the fact, John said that ‘Blues’ was one of the best songs that he got to sing every single night playing live, saying, “It’s just a great song to sing. It’s timeless.” Then again, there are more than a few lines that seem to hit closer to home when you look at them closely.
John’s soulful voice is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on a tune like this, but hearing him sing about loneliness was about more than just him living the rockstar lifestyle and hiding his sexuality away from the world. Everyone has had their fair share of time away from their significant other, and even if Taupin didn’t agree with the line about loving someone more than life itself, that’s the perfect kind of dramatic lyric for someone like John to deliver.
So while a lot of people do have their favourite Elton John tunes in their collection, ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues’ is more about the person singing it than anything else. Even if the lyrics can come off as a bit trite to Taupin, the most important strength a singer has is their delivery, and there’s no one who could have sold this kind of sentiment better than John could in his prime.
