The singer Elton John called “one of the greatest American songwriters”
The art of great pop songwriting is something that Elton John knows like the back of his hand.
The Beatles may have been the ones to open up our minds to what the genre could do, but when listening to John’s 1970s run of records, nearly any one of his hits is a case study of what a perfect melody is supposed to sound like. After the British invasion, this was the next wave of what English songwriting could be, but America had more than their fair share of geniuses by that point.
Then again, John was first smitten with American music long before the Fab Four had even started. From the minute that he heard Elvis Presley for the first time, he was convinced that he wanted to play music for the rest of his life. He may not have been cut out for the frontman role at first, but as long as he had the right songs and a flair for outrageous outfits, he fit right in among the David Bowies and Marc Bolans of the world when he first hit the big time. And yet, the music John was making wasn’t even in the same league as his peers.
For all of the extravagant pieces in his wardrobe, John was a songwriter before anything else, and his greatest heroes came out of the singer-songwriter tradition. The biggest names that he looked up to were everyone from Laura Nyro to James Taylor to Cat Stevens to Bob Dylan, but when you break down that subgenre, it’s not like John exactly looked the part whenever he performed.
He could have followed in the footsteps of someone like Leon Russell, but being a songwriter who stood by the piano all the time wasn’t exactly the coolest thing in the world. There was still a way through with people like Carole King, but when Billy Joel started to come out around the same time that Joel had his first hits, they felt like two sides of the same coin. Their music didn’t sound alike, but you could hardly think of any of their songs being more perfect than they already were.
That said, it’s not like John and Joel had the best relationship at every phase of their career. John, for one, had his fair share of hangups when they decided to do a joint tour together in the late 1990s, and even after that was water under the bridge, hearing about Joel’s drinking problems later on in life led him to make comments that overstepped more than a few bounds with ‘The Piano Man’.
But no matter how many times they had their spats, John had nothing but respect for his American counterpart, and he always wanted to have his best interests at heart, saying, “He’s one of the great American songwriters. But I know when people used to say to me, ‘You’re wasting your life,’ I’d go, ‘Fuck off!’ and I wouldn’t speak to them for two years. Billy was pissed, and I understand. But does it mean I don’t love him? No, of course not.”
Even if John could be a bit too judgemental of what Joel was doing, it’s not like he didn’t have a point now and again. Joel likes to march to the beat of his own drum, and while it’s a shame to watch him walk away from the recording studio while John keeps pushing himself, he never stopped giving the fans what they wanted until he felt like he couldn’t play anymore.
A lot of what John and Joel did felt like polar opposites of each other, but the power of the song is what could keep both of them coming back. They were consummate professionals at the end of the day, and while John will continue to make music for the rest of his life, maybe ‘Turn the Lights Back On’ is a way for Joel to remind everyone why he was so beloved in the days of The Stranger.
