The Eric Clapton song Bernie Taupin thought was terrible: “Appalling”
Any artist should strive to make the one song that perfectly marries lyrics and melody together. Although people like Noel Gallagher might proudly flaunt the fact that their lyrics are about absolutely nothing, there’s a reason why Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan are celebrated for their brilliant wordplay in their songs. It’s easier for people to latch onto songs that take them on a journey, and Bernie Taupin always set the perfect backdrop for Elton John to work off of in his songs.
Which is practically a miracle considering how different both of them were. Both Elton and Taupin were virtually nobodies when they first got together, but when the latter started submitting lyrics for him to write to, Elton finally found his perfect muse. He could never get on board with singing his own material, so it was easier to make tunes with as dramatic a backdrop as Taupin could on tracks like ‘Candle in the Wind’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’.
But not everything Taupin wrote had to fit into the simple singer-songwriter structure. Carole King and James Taylor may have made tunes that were all about their personal experiences, but he had no problem writing tunes about nostalgia on occasion, like ‘Roy Rogers’ or throwing out the occasional lines of lyrics that didn’t necessarily make that much sense but sounded right with the melody.
Then again, Taupin’s writing style was miles different from where rock and roll had started. The whole point of the genre was to be an offshoot of the blues, and that meant not having much on one’s mind other than the troubles of life, whether that was their unhappy love stories or their rough upbringing. And while that model served Eric Clapton perfectly, he wasn’t exactly the deepest songwriter of the bunch.
He was far more interested in playing the best guitar licks of all time, and while they may have been put on the back burner when making tunes like ‘Wonderful Tonight’, it was more than enough for people to give him a pass once he started reinterpreting his material on Unplugged. His guitar genius was still intact, but Taupin drew the line when listening to the song ‘Change the World’.
Compared to every other rock legend that came before him, Taupin felt that Clapton had noted down one of the most insipid lyrics he had heard in a while, saying, “What sold that song, I believe, is production. And it had a good melody. But don’t listen to the lyric. Because the lyric is appalling. It’s a bad lyric. There are some rhymes in there that are really awful. But that’s not what sold the song.”
The fact that it was tied into the John Travolta movie Phenomenon was doing the heavy lifting in terms of promotion, but it’s not like Taupin doesn’t have a point. Looking through each line, the tune is full of some of the biggest cliches heard in a rock and roll song, whether that’s talking about bringing a star back down to Earth or being a ray of sunshine in someone’s life.
‘Crocodile Rock’ might not be one of the most mind-blowing utterances ever spoken by a rock musician, but listening to ‘Change the World’ is where you realise that lyricists don’t get nearly enough credit as they should. Because, as much as some songs might divide fans, it can be a whole lot better than the kind of lines that would appear in your average Hallmark greeting card.
