The musicians Elton John said made “the most beautiful melodies”
It’s impossible to really quantify the impact that Elton John has had on the music world.
He was never exactly the most authentic rock and roller when he first got onstage, but there’s no one else in the 1970s who could have written such gripping melodies whenever they got Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, especially when John was starting to hit that sweet spot on albums like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Honky Chateau. But John would be the first to admit that he would have been nothing without hearing the right kinds of composers that came before him.
Then again, rock and roll wasn’t exactly big on rock stars that wrote their own material when John got started. The Beatles had only just begun the trend of artists who wrote their own material, but when John first fell in love with artists like Elvis Presley, it was much easier to get the right singer and the right song together in one place and worry about who wrote the thing well after the fact. But that’s not what John was aiming for when he started to come into his own.
If anything, he seemed far more interested in being a songwriter first and a singer second. For as much range as he seemed to have whenever he got onstage, he was much more at home standing in the back and playing before the massive sequinned outfits were brought out. But in between his love of artists like Presley and The Beatles, he wanted to touch on what the other singer-songwriters had been doing around that time.
This was the era of everyone from Carole King to James Taylor, and John devoured nearly every song that he heard whenever they came on the radio. Not all of his tunes necessarily had that same storytelling structure, but given that he started on the piano first, he had a lot more finesse on his instrument than someone strumming away on the guitar. He was much more practised, and that came from listening to the greatest composers in classical music by the time he got to writing his own songs.
Which was not all that common in the realm of rock and roll. After all, Chuck Berry had written the song ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ specifically about wanting to kick classical music to the curb, but after studying the works of Bach and Beethoven, John saw something more than a bunch of snooty musicians. These were beautiful pieces, and he wanted to try and implement little pieces of them into his own songs whenever he could.
He didn’t stick around long enough to learn everything they played, but that classical tradition was going to be baked into his playing for the rest of his life, saying, “If you love Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven, you can’t help but be influenced. They wrote the greatest melodies and the most beautiful things of all time.” And it’s not hard to see where he got a lot of his more nuanced tunes from.
Judging by his first records, John proudly wore some of those influences on his sleeve when making songs like ‘The Greatest Discovery’, and even when you start to look outside of the deep cuts, the entire opening overture of ‘Funeral For a Friend’ feels like the kind of musical dirge that Beethoven would have used to soundtrack one of the most depressing pieces that he had ever come up with.
Admitting to listening to these kinds of artists wasn’t going to be considered the coolest thing in the world, but John was never concerned with being hip all the time. He wanted the respect of being a fantastic songwriter, and being able to give a tip of the hat to his heroes every now and again was his way of paying respect to the musicians who sculpted him into who he is today.
