The singer who wrote the world’s great songs, according to Elton John
The quickest way to reach the heart of Elton John was always through his speakers.
He could never say no to a great song whenever it came over the radio as a kid, and even when looking at some of the biggest stars out at the moment, a lot of them usually get his seal of approval if he can tell that they are making truly earnest music. There’s no real way to guarantee what works and what doesn’t throughout the years, but a good melody could transcend any kind of change in style as far as he was concerned.
I mean, just look at the kind of music that he had to go through when working on his first records. Empty Sky might have been doing everything right for the times, but when you look at how he and Bernie Taupin were working, it took a lot more elbow grease before actually reaching the heights that they reached on ‘Your Song’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t have some great teachers along the way.
Both of them would be quick to say that Bob Dylan was one of their major influences, but even if Taupin could get lost in the imagery that Dylan painted with, John was more interested in the music telling the story for him. ‘Tiny Dancer’ set the scene in only a few chords on the piano, but you could tell that this was the kind of slice-of-life story of the kind of person who travelled with some of John’s idols, like Leon Russell.
In the grand story of rock and roll, you don’t really see a combination of John and Taupin very often. Some of the greatest tandems in rock and roll history are usually the ones that are not musicians, but even without having to play a single note, Taupin’s strong suit was about establishing subtle pictures in the listener’s mind, which practically became a road map for John when he eventually started breathing life into them.
In fact, one of the only pairs that seemed to work the same way was Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Everyone else in the world was trying their best to emulate what they were doing so naturally, and even if Goffin didn’t always have firsthand experience in everything he was talking about, the fact that he could make ‘You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman’ sound so perfect is a work of genius whenever he gave it to King to sing or laid Aretha Franklin’s beautiful voice over top of it.
So when King started to sound a bit repetitive in some of her songs, John was the first to say that he wanted to see her take the same chances that he knew she could when he first heard her, saying, “With all due respect to Carole King, Tapestry was a great album, but the other two albums after that sounded like they were recorded at the same sessions but that Tapestry was the first ten tracks done and the next 20 were done when everyone was getting increasingly more tired. She should worry, though, having written some of the world’s great songs, but I couldn’t work with that same line-up on every album.”
King was well within her rights to do whatever the hell she wanted, but some of the best moments of her career did end up coming when she moved out of her comfort zone. She was already taking a chance by stepping out from behind her songwriting credits, but when she fleshed out her band a little bit more, you could feel that same sense of drama in her songs, but with much more power behind it.
No one would have predicted that she would eventually work with someone like Slash on some of her live shows, but she did eventually follow John’s advice when it came to switching things up. The life of a rock and roll star can get boring when the studio starts to look the same, and the best way to get out of that rut is to keep shaking things up whenever things start to sound stale.
