The one musician Elton John said was far ahead of their time
There’s a good chance that Elton John would have still been able to blow minds no matter what generation he found himself in.
He might be a fixture of the 1970s in the same way that David Bowie and Jimmy Page were at the time, but it’s hard to think of his music without going back to the kind of beautifully crafted tunes rather than all of the outrageous outfits. Those may have helped him get his foot in the door, but even when he started to make amateur inroads into the pop charts, not everything that he made had to be completely normal from a songwriting perspective.
After all, his partnership with Bernie Taupin was already a bit unusual in rock and roll. There are plenty of teams in the world of Broadway that manage to work as a musician and a lyricist, but it’s never that common in rock and roll aside from John’s symbiotic relationship with his partner. They were kindred spirits in every sense of the word, and since all Taupin had to do was give him a road map with the lyrics, he could use the rest of the song to do whatever the hell he wanted with the melody.
Which is a lot more freedom than a musician really should have. Compared to the biggest names in music, John was a lot more well-versed in classical music, so it was a lot easier to go in wildly different directions than traditional harmony. A lot of what turned up as album cuts on his early albums felt like a pop interpretation on a Bach invention, but John also never forgot the importance of the singer-songwriter scene as well.
When you look at the peers that John surrounded himself with, he wasn’t necessarily trying to make music in the same way that Bowie or Marc Bolan were in those days. He was inspired to write his own tunes thanks to people like James Taylor, Cat Stevens, and Leon Russell, and it wasn’t until he heard the deeper sounds of California music that he began to really stand up and pay attention to what was going on.
But even in a world where people like Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell were among the biggest names in music, there’s no accurate way to describe what Laura Nyro could do with the right instrument in her hands. She was a true maverick in terms of what a pop song was capable of, and if she was able to take music into strange directions, John didn’t see why he couldn’t do the same thing when making his classics.
Even years after Nyro’s untimely passing, John still couldn’t get over the kind of records that she was able to make, saying, “She influenced more songwriters that came out than anyone else. This is music so far ahead of its time, which, when you still play it, still sounds unbelievable. The sound, the passion, the audacity of how the rhythmic and melody changes come was like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”
And that unconventional structure is heard throughout pretty much anything that John did ever since. Some of the most extravagant moments like ‘Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding’ wouldn’t have been possible without him hearing of Nyro first, and when looking at all the greatest songwriters that came after her, countless people were able to get their foot in the door with songs that weren’t considered normal in the traditional sense of the word.
So it’s no surprise why decades on from hearing her for the first time, John still found time to memorialise her on ‘The Rose of Laura Nyro’ with Brandi Carlile. Because even if she went about pop music in a kooky way compared to everybody else, what Nyro did for her audience isn’t something that anyone can properly teach.
