Released after an unprecedented two year gap, A Single Man is notable as the first album Elton John made without the input of Bernie Taupin, swapping him out for songwriter Gary Osborne on lyric writing duty. Producer Gus Dudgeon, who had overseen every prior album, is also absent, with Elton handling producing duties himself alongside Clive Franks.
I don’t really know the circumstances behind the switch-ups, whether they were amicable breakups or the product of some kind of conflict with John or the label. It could be as simple as John wanting to try a new approach after the slump in sales and critical drubbing that Blue Moves received. I can imagine John and his label bosses figuring that, after the lengthy digressions of Blue Moves, maybe a back to basics approach was necessary.
It didn’t seem to have helped, as A Single Man was once again greeted with lackluster reviews and chart performance, getting as high as number 15 on the US Billboard charts. But is it deserving of its reception, or does it merit better?
Well, to my ears, while this album may have done away with some of the more challenging aspects of Blue Moves, it also does away with the risk-taking and experimentation of previous John albums. John has always been a pop-focused songwriter, but previous efforts found him playing with his sound, trying out new ideas and styles, all under the protective guise of pop hooks. A Single Man sounds good, with a tight pop sheen, and the songs are catchy enough, but end up feeling a bit bland or indistinct.
Part of this, I think, can be traced to Osborne’s lyrics. He largely does away with the poetic abstractions that Taupin indulged in, and which often got him slapped with the label of “pretentious.” But that pretension, that willingness to play with ambiguity and imagery, with lyrics that were borderline incomprehensible, actually went a long way to add dimension and edge to the songs, creating a welcome contrast to John’s gift for easy melodies and laid back grooves. This isn’t to say Osborne is a bad lyricist, but his words feel more functional than worth puzzling out. This could be partially due to a difference in process; where John would previously write songs based on pre-written Taupin lyrics, most of these songs were written the other way around, with Osborne writing lyrics to John’s previously sketched melodies.
You can see this on the late-album song “Madness,” which seems to attempt to capture some of the darkness that John and Taupin were occasionally able to lace into their catchy tunes like rot on an apple. The song details images of violence, bombs, bullets, and death, but doesn’t manage to capture the kind of queasy specificity that Taupin brought to songs like Caribou’s mass shooter portrait “Ticking,” where the lyrics’ disturbing images managed to hit you right in the gut. Maybe it’s the fact that “Madness” seeks to tell us about the ills of the world as opposed to planting us inside one such story and forcing us to watch it play out.
That’s not to say the album is a total waste of time, because it’s still a reasonably enjoyable listen. John’s gift for pop hooks is still on full display, in the Southern gospel-rock swagger on songs like “Big Dipper” and “Georgia,” as well as the effervescent pop of “Part Time Love.” The album ends with “Song for Guy,” a lovely mostly-instrumental song written in tribute to a young employee of John’s Rocket Records who was killed in an accident. Its melody could’ve easily supported lyrics, but it’s somehow more moving without them. John’s knack for catchy tunes makes A Single Man go down easy, even if the songs themselves feel a bit like they’re missing something.
Discographication 