The one album Elton John never wanted to listen to again: “I don’t like it at all”
It’s hard to really poke holes in too many albums that Elton John has ever released.
He would be the first to tell you when one of his records was an absolute dud, and even if there were many times where he struck out, some of them did give everyone a good laugh like when he went disco on Victim of Love. A lot of those records were at least “fun bad” in some respect, but it’s strange to see John going out of his way to talk trash about some of the greatest albums in his discography.
Because when you think about it, the combination of his music and Bernie Taupin’s lyrics felt like they were meant for each other whenever they wrote songs. Taupin’s lines would always be a great road map for John whenever he sat behind the piano, and there’s a good chance that he could have never come up with the melody to ‘Your Song’ if he hadn’t been given words that were that touching.
But as soon as they started their rise, they had a lot more to offer than some of the greatest glam rock songs known to man. That was only one facet of what they did, and when you listen to Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player or Tumbleweed Connection, there was a deep love of many styles of Americana, whether it was making tales of Westerns or making a more comedic take on early rock and roll on ‘Crocodile Rock’.
That might sound strange coming out of someone like John, but he had a natural instinct towards the singer-songwriter genre. He had adored people like Laura Nyro and Leon Russell for years before he decided to devote his life to music, and even when he started writing his first songs, he seemed to be much more at home making songs that catered to the James Taylor fans of the world than whatever T Rex was putting out.
And right in between both sides of his personality is Madman Across the Water. The album itself might not have had the greatest shelf life in his discography outside of ‘Tiny Dancer’, but the best songs he would ever write land on this record. ‘Levon’ is one of his finest ballads, and the stories on the title track and ‘Indian Sunset’ are where Taupin really outdid himself, but John felt that there is one glaring problem lingering in the background of the entire album: his voice.
He was still stretching for what he could do with his voice at the time, but the piano legend felt that he could never go back to the record because of how weak he sounded, saying, “The ironic thing is when people come up to me and say they like my music I say, ‘Don’t say Madman Across the Water.’ For me, the vocal performances on that album stink as far as I’m concerned. I think it’s my least favourite album. The songs I like very much, but I have a very hard time listening to that album. I don’t like it at all.”
Sure, maybe his voice was giving him trouble at the time, but some of that weariness in his voice actually serves the album a lot better. If you think about what a lot of these songs are about, telling the story of everything from a seamstress for a traveling band to a man that can’t connect with his son to a native American watching their home get invaded almost needed that weariness in the singer’s voice to be translated.
Happy accident or not, the vocal performances on Madman Across the Water are tired, rough, and absolutely beautiful for what they are. It wasn’t going to be the finest vocal performance this side of Freddie Mercury, but it didn’t need to be if it meant translating the songs exactly as they were meant to be played.
