The performance Elton John called “the most amazing song”
The musical journey Elton John has gone on has always been about the search for the perfect song.
As much as he’s been a student of legends like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, he has always wanted to make the kind of tune that could move someone in the same way that he was moved when seeing Elvis Presley for the first time. He wanted to write melodies that could pull people out of their seats when they were listening at home, and that all came down to giving the perfect song to the perfect singer.
Then again, John’s choice to sing his own material wasn’t necessarily by choice. He had been through the wringer of the music business more than a few times when he and Bernie Taupin first started writing songs together, and the only reason he managed to become one of the best vocalists of his generation was due to no one else wanting to sing some of their earliest tunes. He had to go it alone, but that’s also what gave him an extra boost when he reached his peak.
Some tunes like ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ may have pulled him well beyond anyone’s normal range, but John would go the extra mile if it meant getting the right sound for whatever the tune needed. Because underneath it all, he was a song craftsman, and that came from listening to every single singer-songwriter that had a guitar in their hands instead of sitting behind a piano.
You have to remember that John came up in the same era that birthed everyone from James Taylor to Cat Stevens to Jackson Browne, and he wanted to write at the same level they were whenever he played. Being a contemporary of one of The Beatles wasn’t in the cards at the time, yet when he was woodshedding his first songs, hearing a writer like Paul Simon come up with ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ was enough to stop him in his tracks.
Simon would be the first to say that Art Garfunkel knocked it out of the park when singing the tune, but there’s a certain gravitas missing from the tune. The arrangement was absolutely perfect on the final version, but when Aretha Franklin added her own gospel flair to everything with a piano backing her, John figured that no one was going to hear anything better than that on the charts.
Franklin was already a living legend, so getting a song like that on the hit parade was a stroke of genius for John, saying, “Bernie and I used to listen to that whole album on headphones. When it’s sung by Aretha Franklin, this is just the most amazing song. But the piano playing made it, for me: it stayed with me forever.” And it really makes sense why Franklin would be the perfect person to sing this.
Sure, the song is admittedly about companionship, but when Franklin sings it, she turns it into a spiritual awakening in those few minutes. There’s hardly any way to screw up the song, but when she plays off the piano and starts reaching up into that higher register, there was no one else on this Earth who could have ever managed to match the conviction she had in her voice.
John could certainly try his hand at adding a little bit of flair to his own material, but the idea of making a record as good as Simon’s words and Franklin’s vocal prowess felt like a pipe dream. Any musician should try to welcome a challenge whenever they’re making a record, but sometimes you have to simply admit defeat and salute the true greats dominating their field.
