“Lyrically beautiful”: The Elton John song nobody could escape

Posted On October 10, 2024October 10, 2024

Most artists can only hope to have multiple phases of their career. Anyone’s time in the sun on the charts usually sets up a ticking clock, and once that runs out, listeners are bound to either throw their favourite artists in the trash or never bother to listen to their new stuff ever again. Although Elton John has been able to go through different decades without missing a beat, he admitted that the one song that no one could ignore from his career had to be ‘Your Song’.

Then again, is it really easy to ignore someone like Elton John when he was dressed like he was in the 1970s? He had always seen himself in the same ballpark as singer-songwriters like James Taylor and Leon Russell, but looking at his get-up, he fit in a lot closer with people like David Bowie and Marc Bolan with his various sequinned suits and the occasional headwear that made him look like rock and roll royalty.

But having a good gimmick doesn’t always mean having great songs. For all of the window dressing, there has to be some heart behind everything, and despite John having some of the most outrageous outfits this side of Liberace, he still knew how to make people’s hearts dance whenever he came on the radio.

Even though Bernie Taupin was responsible for writing almost every one of his iconic lines, the musical framework behind John’s music was in a class by itself. Remember that this is a man who ended up taking multiple courses learning about classical music, and listening to some of his early records like Empty Sky or his eponymous sophomore release, tunes like ‘The Greatest Discovery’ showed that he could bridge the gap between a pop hit and Bach’s greatest works.

No one needed a knowledge of classical music to get what was going on in ‘Your Song’. Compared to artists writing story-driven songs, this is one of the most direct love songs that Taupin ever put to paper, which was a perfect marriage with John’s wistful melody. Even though it’s half a century old, having someone say that life is wonderful just because they have you is enough to warm the coldest hearts just a little bit.

And now that it’s become a standard, John is proud that he wrote a song that has become a part of the cultural lexicon at this point, saying, “‘Your Song’ you can’t get away from. It’s a beautiful song. It’s lyrically beautiful. It was written in about five minutes [and] recorded in two.” But it’s not just about what the song means. It’s about what it brought along with it.

From the moment that it became a hit, John had a template for what to aim for when making hits. Although Tumbleweed Connection and Madman Across the Water were constructed as albums in the same tradition as The Beatles, tracks like ‘Tiny Dancer’ and ‘Country Comfort’ were too much for radio stations to ignore, eventually paving the way for him racking up all-star numbers for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Many of John’s subsequent albums would be far more lavish, but ‘Your Song’ still has the same power that it had when he was first cutting it. It was far from the most sophisticated recording of its time, but if there’s a good tune at the heart of the recording, it doesn’t matter what all of the bells and whistles are.

Related Topics