The classic Elton John song written in 20 minutes
Some of the best songs don’t always require that much effort. As much as artists might like to pore over every word of a song until it’s exactly where it’s supposed to be, it’s easy to get a perfect melody as if it fell out of the sky. It happened to The Beatles with songs like ‘Yesterday’, but Elton John made the whole thing look easy when crafting ‘Your Song’.
During that time, John was still a budding piano player fresh out of his usual gig in the band Bluesology. Quickly changing his name and rebranding himself as an English answer to the singer-songwriters of the world, John didn’t fully click until he began hooking up with lyricist Bernie Taupin to provide a voice to what he was expressing musically.
Having already had a record under his belt with the album Empty Sky, John was still anonymous in mainstream rock until the song ‘Your Song’ fell into his head. Compared to the different lyrics that may have taken an eternity to get down on paper, Taupin recalled working on the song unbelievably fast, saying (via Songfacts), “The original lyric was written very rapidly on the kitchen table of Elton’s mother’s apartment in Northwood Hills in the suburbs of London, if I recall, on a particularly grubby piece of exercise paper.”
Once Taupin passed the lyrics onto John, the song practically wrote itself, with the final version finished in about 20 minutes. Within that time, John had created one of his purest melodies, which would become his first major breakout hit at the time.
Compared to the more nuanced songs that he would write in later life, Taupin would admit that the song lyrics were a lot triter than he would have probably written later, saying, “ [It] has got to be one of the most naïve and childish lyrics in the entire repertoire of music, but I think the reason it still stands up is because it was real at the time. I was 17 years old, and it was coming from someone whose outlook on love or experience with love was new and naive.”
This song would only be the launching pad for the rest of their career. Coming directly after this track, both John and Taupin would go on a writing bender for the ages, notching up one hit after another on songs like ‘Tiny Dancer’ or ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. Instead of the kind of love song that ‘Your Song’ is, Taupin’s lyrics also took a different approach, looking to be more reflective as he grew older.
Despite having a treasure trove of hits between them, Taupin still has the signature hit follow him around everywhere he goes, recalling in Classic Rock Stories, “It’s the song that you hear everywhere, you hear it at Safeway, you hear it in the elevator in the Holiday Inn, you hear it in the hotel bar of Holiday Inn. It’s become a Holiday Inn song.”
Even with the massive adulation that has come with it, the song has remained a staple for its simplistic message, talking about how wonderful life can be as long as John has someone who loves him in the world. Instead of being tired of the hit, Taupin has seen his staple tune as a musical companion, reflecting, “It’s like an old friend, it means so many things on equally as many levels. It’s certainly proved its worth, and I’ve heard it sung a million times. It’s like a good dog, it’s always there.”
