Elton John #30: The Diving Board (2013)

It was seven long years in between Elton John’s last solo album and The Diving Board.  In between he released a collaborative album with his old buddy Leon Russell called The Union, which I did not listen to for the purposes of this blog but plan to check out one of these days, and made a bunch of guest appearances on other artists’ work, from Kate Bush to Brandi Carlile to Queens of the Stone Age.  The release date for The Diving Board was pushed back a number of times from its original date of fall 2012, with Elton adding new compositions and tinkering with the track order.  Finally, about a year later, The Diving Board was released to strong sales and decent reviews.

The album reminds me a bit of Blue Moves, another album that found Elton and Bernie in a more somber, reflective mode.  Producer T-Bone Burnett, who had also produced The Union and has worked wonders with a number of veteran artists, wisely stays out of the way, foregrounding Elton’s voice and piano and giving the album a subtly warm feel.  They keep the arrangements simple and stripped down, all the better to foreground a lovely and complex set of lyrics from Bernie.

Bernie’s lyrics on The Diving Board are more concerned with the world around them rather than the more inward-looking lyrics of the past few albums.  Whether that’s trying to understand the sacrifice of previous generations on “Oceans Away,” detailing the exile of the titular man of letters on “Oscar Wilde Gets Out,” giving a voice to a blind, black piano player on “The Ballad of Blind Tom,” or being reminded of the violence outside their comfortable environs on “Mexican Vacation (Kids in the Candlelight),” there’s plenty to unpack across most of these songs.

There’s others, like “My Quicksand,” that I just plain don’t get.  Per the chorus: “I went to Paris once / I thought I had a plan / I woke up with an accent / I wound up in quicksand.”  Hmm.  It can’t help but stick out as another one of Bernie’s poetic obfuscations, especially against the relative clarity of some of the other songs.

Luckily, the good definitely outweighs the…not bad, but less good, I guess.  I’m a particular fan of “Ballad of Bind Tom,” which tells the story of Blind Tom Wiggins, a piano player who, in more recent years, has been categorized as an autistic savant, taken advantage of by the white powers-that-be in the slave era South.  While it’s a bit squirm-inducing to hear Elton sing lines like “may we present to you / all you Jim Crow monkeys / from Harlan County down to Tuscaloo,” the language feels purposeful to evoke the disconnect and the way that Black people were only viewed as human so much as they had moneymaking power.  Blind Tom’s is a story I wasn’t familiar with, and Bernie does an excellent job of granting him some agency that he didn’t have in life.

Another track that sticks out for me is “A Town Called Jubilee.”  Another song that could’ve fit nicely among the Southern narrators of Tumbleweed Connection, Elton provides it a cool, circular piano pattern, and the lyrics have a wonderful specificity that makes its characters’ striving, leaving their run-down Southern town to search for a better place, that much more effective.  The Diving Board is Elton at this most unhurried, taking his time to get it right, and I think the approach paid off.

We’ve got one more to go in our Elton journey!  Join me as we listen to Elton’s final album to date, though I’m sure the old pro has plenty more left in him.

Elton John #29: The Captain & the Kid (2006)

You may recall, back in 1975, Elton John released Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, an intensely autobiographical suite of songs detailing his early years collaborating with Bernie Taupin.  It was a massive hit, the first album ever to #1 on the charts in its first week, and more or less marked the end of Elton’s “classic period” (to borrow a phrase from Stevie Wonder) that started in 1970.

31 years later, Elton and Bernie would return to their comic book-esque alter egos to deliver The Captain & the Kid, a belated sequel to Captain Fantastic that purports to cover the intervening years since we last met our heroes.  The first album chronicled their rise from struggling songwriters-for-hire to having their first big hit, a period which only spanned a few years, whereas this one has three whole decades to catch us up on.

So yeah, there’s a lot of ground to cover.  And The Captain & the Kid lacks the clear narrative throughline of the earlier album, starting out as a detailed chronicle before realizing that, actually, that would take forever, opting instead for a more general look back at the years gone by.  This is probably out of necessity; if they took a granular look at the last thirty years in the same way they looked at their first few on Captain Fantastic, we’d probably be here for ten hours.

It starts pretty much where the last album left off, with our heroes, now full-fledged superstars, touching down in a turbulent America on “Postcards from Richard Nixon.”  From there, they take in the weirdos, and try not to be taken in by the hucksters, on “Just Like Noah’s Ark,” enjoy the splendor of New York City on “Wouldn’t Have it Any Other Way (NYC),” butt heads on “Tinderbox,” and struggle with addiction on “And the House Fell Down.”

The latter half of the album gets a bit more diffuse, with Elton more broadly looking back on the friends he’s lost (“Blues Never Fade Away”), reflecting on mortality  (“The Bridge”), and thinking about his past lovers (“I Must Have Lost It on the Wind”) before pivoting back to reminiscing about the early days on “Old ’67” and giving The Captain and The Kid one last ride on, um, “The Captain and the Kid.”

Pretty much all of Elton’s post-millennial albums have been in a reflective mode, remembering times gone by and the ways that a life can change with the years.  The Captain & the Kid takes that to its logical next step, an album that’s more about remembering than anything else.  It can’t help but feel a bit more diffuse than its predecessor, which again is probably due to the whole trying-to-fit-thirty-years-into-forty-minutes thing, where the duo just has to skip around a lot to catch us up.

It’s tempting to wish that we’d gotten more of a deep musical dive (maybe a whole album about what it was like recording Leather Jackets?), but luckily The Captain & the Kid is another strong batch of songs in Elton’s stripped-down mode.  The instrumentation is in line with the last couple albums, and the production is warm and unobtrusive.  There’s an extra kick of nostalgia to know that old bandmates Davy Johnstone and Nigel Olsson are backing him up here (and to be fair, they’ve been backing him up for a few albums now), minus bassist Dee Murray, who died in 1992.

As a 29 year-old, I don’t have much of a concept of death.  I’ve lost people close to me, as probably most of us have, but I can only imagine what it must feel like the older you get, as more of your peers begin to pass away while you stick around.  As Elton-via-Bernie asks on “Blues Never Fade Away,” “how did we get so lucky?” The Captain & the Kid manages to capture that feeling pretty well indeed.

Elton John #28: Peachtree Road (2004)

The American South has been a fascination for Elton John and Bernie Taupin dating all the way back to their third album.  So it’s only fitting that Elton, now a hugely famous recording artist, would keep one of his presumably several homes down there, specifically in the Atlanta area, on the street which gives Peachtree Road its title.  It’s also fitting for an album that’s generally reflective, warm, and content.

Peachtree Road continues Elton’s more stripped-back approach, with his core band of piano, bass, drums, and guitar, alongside the occasional strings or Hammond organ.  Evidently this is the first album Elton produced completely on his own, and its unfussy quality adds to its inviting feel.

The album mostly finds Elton and Bernie reflecting on the years gone by and all the things they’ve managed to achieve, sometimes with a touch of melancholy but mostly with a gentle, settled air.  “Fortune and fame is so fleeting / these days I’m happy to say / I’m amazed that I’m still around,” Elton sings on the opener “Weight of the World,” a song about looking back on life with a newfound air of freedom, about not feeling like you have to take on the burdens of the world.  It’s the sort of sentiment that age (and a whole lot of money) can bring, and Elton mostly stays in that mode throughout.  Even on “Turn the Lights Out When You Leave,” a honky tonk breakup anthem, he doesn’t seem too distraught by his lover’s leaving, assuring them (and us) that he’s gonna be just fine.

For an album named for a street in the South, it’s a less overtly Southern album than Tumbleweed Connection, at least in sound.  The aforementioned “Turn the Lights Out…” is pretty much the only straight-up country song, and “They Call Her the Cat” is a fun sort of Southern soul number with Swampers horns.  But imagery of the South in its beauty and tranquility pops up frequently; it’s like the sunnier songs on Tumbleweed like “Country Comfort” or “Amoreena” rather than the more somber story-songs.  “Porch Swing in Tupelo” finds Elton conferring with Elvis, or at least his memory as “that truck drivin’ boy / with the grease monkey look and the rock n’ roll voice.”  The titular porch swing was apparently one that the young Elvis himself used to swing on, and Elton sings about it with the kind of reverence reserved for hallowed ground, as if he can absorb a bit of that musical talent just by sitting there (not that he needs much more talent anyway).

Things only start to get a little unsettled towards the end.  “I’m scared of strangers / on the street / world’s so ugly / I can’t breathe,” Elton sings on “It’s Getting Dark in Here,” a song where the narrator’s clearly haunted, but it’s unclear whether it’s internal and external forces making him feel that way.  Luckily, he recovers on the final track “I Can’t Keep This From You,” which has the same kind of big, gauzy sound that characterized his 90s albums, and kind of feels like a holdover from that era that got tacked onto this record somehow.  It’s not a bad song, but it kind of breaks from the rest of the album’s feel in a way that’s a bit distracting.

Peachtree Road is another solid outing from this newly stripped down Elton and co., and while I didn’t find it quite as strong as Songs from the West Coast, it’s a mostly cozy, comfortable collection, and a nice reminder that sometimes we just need to slow down and enjoy what’s around us.

Elton John #27: Songs from the West Coast (2001)

As the new millennium dawned, Elton John’s output slowed considerably.  Where he’d averaged an album a year with the occasional gap in between, a full four years elapsed between The Big Picture and Songs from the West Coast, his first album of the new century.

So what does the 21st century have in store for our old pal Elton?  From the album’s first moments, where his piano enters your ears, shortly joined by simple drums and the oooh/aaaah backing vocals, it’s clear that Elton’s ushering in a new era by returning to the sounds that made him famous.  Stripped of the often-overbearing production of his 80s and 90s work, with only the occasional strings or keyboards to this is Elton fully embracing his position as a pop elder statesman, making music on his own terms.

It helps that Songs from the West Coast is a pretty stellar batch of songs, utilizing his old sonic playbook but with a mature, dignified air.  It doesn’t sound like Elton trying to recapture his old glory days, but rather stripping back to the things that matter most and delivering a satisfying album without a lot of fuss.

Songs from the West Coast finds Elton–through Bernie Taupin’s lyrics as usual–looking back to look forward, inhabiting characters that acknowledge the way life has made them bitter and closed off, but often trying to open their hearts again despite the pain.  On “Dark Diamond,” Elton sings about the way in which the walls he’s built have cost him the love that was able to cut through his defenses in the first place.  Later, on “I Want Love,” he sings about the ways life has hardened him, while admitting he still wants to be loved in an uncomplicated way.  It might not be the most romantic sentiment, but it feels like a hard-earned stance after a lifetime of heartbreak.

Side note: “I Want Love” was the album’s first single and has a pretty great music video featuring a pre-Iron Man-comeback Robert Downey Jr. lipsyncing the vocals while wandering around an empty house.  Definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it.

The heartbreak isn’t just internal, though.  “American Triangle” finds Elton singing about the brutal killing of Matthew Shepherd, a gay teenager in small-town Wyoming who was beaten and left to die, an incident which sparked national conversations about bigotry and violence.  Bernie’s lyrics juxtapose the beauty of the Wyoming landscape with the harsh reality of the violence Matthew suffered.  Assisted by Rufus Wainwright on backing vocals, Elton sings with a mix of anger and a sorrowful resignation; Matthew wasn’t the first, or the last.

When they’re not exploring love and loss, Elton and Bernie look back on their younger days with a new sense of perspective, examining the ways that their lives have changed over the years.  On the opening track “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Elton sings about the confident lie of youth, looking outwardly together but being just as messed up on the inside in the way that you can only do when you’re living fast and young.  Elsewhere, on “Ballad of the Boy in the Red Shoes,” Elton looks back on the wild kid he used to be while acknowledging that he’s not that guy anymore, even as the image of his younger self seems to linger like its own form of lost love.

Perhaps the best thesis for the album, and for Elton of the new millennium, comes at the very end.  On “This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore,” Elton sings “all the things I’ve said in songs / all the purple prose you bought from me / reality’s just black and white / the sentimental things I’d write / never meant that much to me.”  So is Bernie admitting through Elton that it was all a lie, that all the songs they’ve made together, have all been an act?

I don’t really think it’s that simple.  They’re acknowledging that they’re not as young as they once were, and the passions of youth that used to fuel them don’t do the same anymore.  When Elton sings “I’m dried up and sick to death of love / if you need to know it / I never really understood that stuff,” it doesn’t hit me as an admission of fraud, but more an admission that as we get older, we realize we know less and less than we thought we did.  The lie of youth, that we know everything there is to know about the world, that we have everything figured out, might be what we need to get by, but at a certain point we have to realize that we don’t have much of anything figured out, and that’s okay.  That even people as successful as Elton John and Bernie Taupin feel that way is both comforting and disturbing.

Ultimately, I think what Elton and Bernie are trying to say is that, yep, they’re older now, and the frantic pace of their career isn’t sustainable anymore.  From now on, they’ll be making the kind of music they want to make, when they want to make it.  And the fact that they’ve only released five albums in the last 20 years speaks to that shift in mindset.  If they’re all as good as Songs from the West Coast, then the wait seems worth it.

Elton John #26: The Big Picture (1997)

Now we come to The Big Picture, Bernie Taupin’s least favorite album he and Elton made together.  While Elton himself cites Leather Jackets as the worst, Bernie believed his lyrical inspiration ran a bit dry on this one, and that the high-gloss 90s production lent the album a coldness that did it no favors.  I’m not sure I totally agree, but I didn’t find it to be a particularly memorable addition to the canon.  For my money, Victim of Love still takes the top (bottom) spot, and I have a feeling it’ll stay that way unless one of these later albums is a total mess.

The album’s pretty par for the course for Elton’s 90s work, with big production and mostly slow-tempo ballads, wrapped up in a general air of elder statesman respectability.  The cover image, of Elton’s face made out of shards of broken plates, seems to suggest an album full of domestic unrest, but the songs don’t really bear that out (still a cool image though).

Occasionally, Elton’s maximalist pop approach serves the songs well, particularly on the uptempo gospel-pop of “If the River Can Bend,” which layers a handclappy rhythm, Davy Johnstone’s electric guitar, Elton’s keyboard, a backup choir, and more into a wall-of-sound arrangement that’s genuinely stirring.  It also elevates the opening track, “A Long Way From Happiness,” where gentle synths murmur under Elton’s piano and heavily processed drums.

The lyrics mostly find Bernie musing on domesticity and romance, contemplating whether love is inherently doomed on “The End Will Come,” yearning for a sense of freedom on “Live Like Horses,” struggling with the aftermath of a lost love on “Love’s Got a Lot to Answer For,” but also reveling in the other side on “Something in the Way You Look Tonight,” one of the album’s more moving love songs.  While none of the lyrics are cringe-worthy, I can kinda see why Bernie’s not a fan of these; the set lacks some of the clarity or poetic imagery that makes his best lyrics stick in your brain, making the end product skirt on the edge of banal at times.

I feel like I don’t have much to say about this one.  It’s another respectable set of songs, professionally done, that no doubt appealed to his fanbase.  It did pretty well, reaching number nine on the Billboard chart, but I don’t think anyone holds it up all that highly these days.  Maybe back when it came out with the two-year wait in between albums, these 90s outings seemed a bit fresher, but listening to them in short order, the fatigue is setting in.  Elton’s output will slow considerably from this point on, but I’m excited to see what the new millennium has in store.

Elton John #25: Made in England (1995)

In the interim between Duets and Made in England, Elton John made another huge leap in his career.  The soundtrack for the 1994 Disney film The Lion King, for which Elton had written the original songs with lyricist Tim Rice, became a huge success in its own right, having sold somewhere on the order of 10 million copies as of today and reaching Diamond status with the RIAA.  It also cemented Elton as not only a successful recording artist in his own right, but also as a capable writer for films and musicals; he and Rice would collaborate once again on the stage musical Aida and the 2000 animated film The Road to El Dorado.  

Which is all to say that Elton didn’t really have to keep making albums of his own–he could’ve raked in piles of cash writing for films and called it a day.  But thankfully, he’s just too much of a pro for that, and so he soldiered on, releasing Made in England in 1995.

The album’s cover art, a simple photo of Elton smiling softly in a turtleneck and tasteful round glasses, might lead you to think that this is another “back to basics” record, stripping away the excess and delivering a straightforward set of songs, but that’s not really the case.  It’s very much in his stately, adult-contemporary mode, but I think it’s a more satisfying set of songs than his other 90s output has been so far, with some enjoyably throwback tracks and a sharp, focused set of lyrics from Bernie Taupin.

Made in England also finds Elton re-teaming with Paul Buckmaster, whose string arrangements added drama to most of his 70s albums, lending his usual orchestral sweep to a few of the tracks.  It serves as a great reminder that this guy really was one of the secret weapons on Elton’s early work; his string additions here work beautifully, particularly on “Belfast,” where they subtly call out to Irish fiddle music and evoke the song’s setting.

The album also features some of Bernie’s best lyrics in quite some time, in my opinion.  The opening track, the bombastic ballad “Believe,” starts out pretty simply, with Elton singing “I believe in love, it’s all we got / love has no boundaries, costs nothing to touch,” but it gets more interesting towards the end of the song when Elton sings “without love, I’d have no anger / I wouldn’t believe in the right to stand here.”  It’s an interesting line because it shows that an expression of love doesn’t always have to be soft and sweet and tender, sometimes it’s righteous fucking indignation.  I’m not sure if Bernie is writing towards Elton’s now-out sexuality, but a line like that could easily be read that way, that love is the reason equality is worth fighting for.

The title track also features some interesting lyrics around that same theme.  It sounds like Elton angrily laying down the gauntlet, singing about childhood violence and neglect, saying to those who would be scandalized by his recent coming out, “you had a scent for scandal, well here’s my middle finger / I had forty years of pain and nothing to cling to.”  Having been forced to stay in the closet his whole life up to now, living his truth is liberating, and anyone with a problem can just piss off.

It seems that the upbringing that caused him pain also made him tough: “If you’re made in England, you’re built to last / You can still say ‘homo’ and everybody laughs / But the joke’s on you, you never read the song / They all think they know but they all got it wrong.”  I think you can read this as Elton taunting the haters, saying it was all there if you paid attention.  Given that Elton’s sexuality seems very, very clear with the benefit of hindsight, this is understandable.

There’s some really solid stuff on here, from the aforementioned tracks to the surprisingly chipper “Pain” and the stirring “Belfast,” about The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the resilience of its people.  I also really enjoyed “Please,” a bright 60s-style throwback with jangling acoustic guitar and ringing Rickenbacker-style electrics making it sound like some lost early Beatles track.

The album wraps up with the sweet “Blessed,” an ode to an imagined child and a promise to give them the best life possible, should they arrive.  It seems like the wishing paid off, since Elton now has two sons with his husband David.

Speaking of David, the album is dedicated to him, and it seems like there’s no better way to pay tribute to a new love than with an album of songs that is unapologetic about its truth.  Elton’s got nothing to hide anymore, and you can tell it’s really damn liberating.

Elton John #24: Duets (1993)

Ah, the duets album.  A time-tested moneymaker that has had a long and healthy life in the music business.  If you stick around long enough, odds are you’re gonna record one of these things, and probably make a bunch of money while you’re at it.

At the time that Elton John released Duets in 1993, I don’t think they were quite as popular as they would become (Frank Sinatra recorded his own oft-lampooned duets album the same year–check out Phil Harman’s classic spoof from SNL back in the day), though the success of this album–certified platinum in the US–probably had something to do with their eventual pervasiveness.

Elton’s entry into the genre finds him calling in a number of famous friends from across the musical spectrum for an album of mostly covers, a couple originals, and a few re-dos of old songs.  And it’s…mostly fine.  Pretty respectable, occasionally corny, but not outright embarrassing.  A mixed bag, but that’s to be expected when there’s so many cooks in the kitchen.

I think if I could pinpoint one thing that this album is missing for me, it’s a sense of fun or spontaneity.  Everything is so polished, so produced, that it doesn’t even seem like anyone’s having that great of a time.  It makes me wish Elton had just loosened up and thrown a big ol’ musical party with some of his friends, but I suppose this was probably the safer route for an artist of his stature.

Stylistically, the album’s all over the map, ranging from slow gospel ballads to contemporary R&B slow jams to even a full on club track (more on that later).  Elton acquits himself ably across the genres, leaning into the drama on “When I Think About Love (I Think About You)” with R&B act PM Dawn, or adding a little grit to the countrified “Shaky Ground” with the Eagles’ Don Henley, never really feeling too out of his element.

The first half is a bit slow, with some sappy ballads like an overproduced rendition of the old Cole Porter song “True Love” with his old “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” duet partner Kiki Dee, but things pick up a bit in the back half, starting with “Go On and On,” a duet with the great Gladys Knight written, produced, and performed by our old Discographication buddy Stevie Wonder.  The song is very much in the vein of 90s Stevie (think the better songs on Jungle Fever), with squelchy synths and a programmed (or at least programmed-sounding) rhythm, along with Stevie’s pretty standard lyrics about letting love go on and on and so forth.  You can see a lot of the songwriter’s personality coming through, which makes it a fun listen.

Next up is probably the strangest, and consequently most fun, swing on the album: a thumping House-style rendition of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” featuring current reigning Queen of America, RuPaul.  With a beat by Italian disco legend Giorgio Moroder, it leans all the way into the style, and while it’s weird to hear Elton singing over this kind of track, it gets by on charm and Ru’s surprisingly subtle supporting vocal.  In any event, it’s a lot better than the last time he tried to do dance music.

Generally, when Elton and company keep things simple, the songs work best, as they do on his take on the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell classic “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” with Marcella Detroit.  It’s a straightforward rendition that they don’t try to gunk up too much, and this approach carries over into “I’m Your Puppet,” another soul classic, this time featuring English musician Paul Young.

One of my favorite songs comes towards the end, when Elton teams up with none other than Leonard Cohen on the country standard “Born to Lose.”  Their version hews pretty closely to Ray Charles’ jazzy take from Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, and it’s really just a pleasure to hear Cohen’s deep growl intoning the sadsack country lyrics.

Elton had already released his live duet of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” with George Michael, and it had been a big hit, so he includes it here again.  The duo work well together, as they always have, and Elton’s newer, lower voice adds a welcome bit of strained grit to his verses.  The album ends on “Duets for One,” which as you might expect, is not actually a duet, but a pretty catchy little pop track.

I can’t say I really loved Duets, but it’s not an unpleasant listen either (I don’t think Elton could make an unpleasant album if he tried).  It’s mostly just kinda slow and really damn long, clocking in at about 75 minutes.  The high points are enjoyable, but I wouldn’t call any of it essential for anyone other than Elton superfans (or poor bastards who decided to listen to all his albums in order).

Elton John #22: Sleeping With the Past (1989)

Elton John closes out a wonky decade by, appropriately enough, looking back on Sleeping With the Past, a really solid collection of songs and one of his better 80s albums.  Plus, look at the cover, he’s got a cool blonde dye job!  How could it not be good?

If you’ve been reading this for any length of time, you know that the 80s was a bit of a rough time for Elton, his albums yoyo-ing from the critical and commercial highs of Too Low for Zero to the career lows (on both fronts) of Leather Jackets, with some decent but middle-of-the-road entries in between.  As the decade drew to a close, Elton and Bernie Taupin had experienced a bit of a resurgence on Reg Strikes Back, an album designed as a rebirth.  Keen to capitalize on another upswing, the duo decided to create an album that felt like a cohesive whole.  They decided to look back to the R&B songs of the 60s that they loved and write a set of tracks that worked as a throwback to that earlier era, apparently inspired by Billy Joel’s success on the similarly 60s-aping An Innocent Man.  

While most people would hear “inspired by Billy Joel” and run the other way as fast as possible, I was actually a bit intrigued by that tidbit, since I have a nostalgic fondness for that particular Joel album (it was frequently in the CD player at my house as a kid).  But where Joel’s album was all throwback pastiche, Elton had been playing with these sounds for basically his whole career, so Sleeping With the Past doesn’t feel like much of a reinvention.

Luckily, that doesn’t really matter, because it also happens to be a really solid album.  It’s still definitely a product of its time, with Elton still favoring keyboards over piano, but doesn’t feel too processed or overblown.  The whole thing is solid, but it has a few straight-up knockouts, particularly in its middle section made up of “Club at the End of the Street,” “Sleeping With the Past,” “Stone’s Throw From Hurtin’,” and “Sacrifice.”

“Stone’s Throw From Hurtin’,” in particular, might be one of my favorite Elton songs of the 80s.  Anchored by a strutting soul beat and a bluesy guitar lick from Davy Johnstone, Elton sings in a surprisingly restrained, choked back style that reminded me a little of Prince or Elton’s buddy George Michael.  It’s easily the best example of the album’s whole premise, and just an incredibly catchy song.  I mean, why wasn’t it a single?  I have no idea.

The title track also works wonderfully, with a buzzing synth mimicking a squawking horn section to lend some heft and attitude to back up Elton’s empowering “forget that asshole” anthem.  It kind of sounds like something Aretha Franklin might have belted over, and it’s pretty spectacular.

“Sacrifice,” believe it or not, was his first #1 single in the U.K. as a solo artist, which is kind of mind-boggling this far into his career, but it makes sense because it’s a lovely song.  Over lush, swooning synths, Elton sings one of his more appealing melodies in a long time, as Bernie’s lyrics tell what I think is an infidelity story?  I can’t really tell, but it sounds nice.  It definitely feels like an 80s ballad, but if you can get down with that, which I can (sometimes), it’s an excellent specimen.

The rest of the album is solid, if not quite on the level of that middle stretch, but it ends strong with “Blue Avenue.”  Elton actually plays straight-up piano (!), alongside some lovely muted trumpet-synth and an unexpected bluesy lick from Johnstone.  Supposedly the lyrics tell the story of Elton’s failed marriage to Renate Blauel, looking back with a sense of resignation that they were on separate trajectories and ultimately couldn’t survive.  It’s pretty ambiguous, but makes for a fitting closer to this collection of songs.

Sleeping With the Past was met with fairly mixed reviews, but remains a fan favorite from the era, and I can understand why.  All of these 80s albums kind of end up being graded on a curve, but this one is truly a standout.  I kind of don’t get why it wasn’t better received, but I’m glad Elton could close out a spotty decade on a strong note.  Let’s see what the 90s has in store.

Elton John #21: Reg Strikes Back (1988)

From the title to the cover art on down, Reg Strikes Back was positioned as another comeback album.  With a title referencing Elton’s birth name and a cover showing a pile of costumes (all supposedly ones that Elton was putting up for auction), it has the air of shaking off the gaudiness and the excess that had been his stock and trade for well over a decade and getting back to what’s real, man.

This is pure speculation, but I think this appealed to Elton for a couple of reasons.  Primarily, the last few albums had seen diminishing returns both critically and financially, bottoming out with Leather Jackets, his worst-charting and worst-reviewed record in years.  Secondly, this is his first album after having a necessary but potentially career-ending throat surgery, so it’s entirely possible he felt like a new man with a new lease on life and wanted to start fresh.

Which is all well and good, but is it truly the back to basics album that it seemed it was meant to be?  Well, not exactly.  There’s still plenty of the requisite 80s sheen on these songs, with Elton mostly favoring his keyboard textures over his piano.  However, he does manage to strip back a bit of the gunk and deliver a more straightforward and generally solid set of songs.

There’s a few clunkers on here, but there’s also some that capture a bit of that old Elton Magic(TM), particularly the album’s first (and biggest) single “I Don’t Wanna Go On With You Like That,” an infectious kiss-off tune with a snappy rhythm and Elton’s irresistible syncopated piano line.  Another single, “A Word in Spanish,” is a lush ballad featuring some expected Flamenco-style guitar and lyrics about the desire to find a way to express love beyond language.  Its chorus pulls from one of Bernie Taupin’s most consistent inspirations: the cinema, not even needing to understand the language in order to feel the emotion behind it.

As per usual, the songs are at their best when they’ve got a little bit of the old sass and bite, which makes “Goodbye Marlon Brando” such a fun listen.  Listing a litany of contemporary woes and the ways in which modern society can overwhelm the senses, Elton sings “don’t it make you want to crawl back to the womb / find a sanitarium, rent yourself a room?” which is an incredibly relatable line if you ask me. 

It seems like the ways that modern life can suffocate you becomes a recurring theme on the album.  On the opener “Town of Plenty” Elton sings about some fantastical place where “only art survives…we have no media” and “we had something in common.”  The duo dip back into the past on “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters (Part Two),” which finds them returning to the city they paid reluctant tribute to back on Honky Chateau.  I’m a bit dubious about following up one of the loveliest ballads in their canon with a danceable New Wave sequel, but it does follow the Hollywood maxim of sequels being “what people liked about the last one but more of it,” so I guess it tracks.

The theme carries onto side 2 with “Goodbye Marlon Brando” and “Heavy Traffic,” a chronicle of the low lifes ekeing out existence in the margins over a surprisingly buoyant rhythm reminiscent of Cuban jazz.  But life in the city isn’t all bad, as the band extolls the virtues of womanhood on the moony-eyed closer “Since God Invented Girls.”  Shouting out The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, the king of moony-eyed songs about girls, it’s a surprisingly slow and sincere ballad to the wonder of the female persuasion that probably could’ve benefitted from a lighter hand, but is still kind of enjoyable.

I wouldn’t say Reg Strikes Back feels like a true comeback album in the way that Too Low for Zero did, but it thankfully puts Elton back on the right track with more hits than misses.  Let’s hope the ratio stays strong as the 80s draw to a close.

Elton John #19: Ice on Fire (1985)

Man, sometimes my research-oriented brain is a blessing and a curse.  In my desire to know all the info about any given subject, particularly when it comes to the art I consume, I try to read as many reviews and articles as I can.  The problem, then, is that if a given work has predominantly bad reviews, it’s pretty much impossible to give it a pure, unbiased reaction.  As much as I like to tell myself, “Nah, man, I can be impartial, I can set it aside,” in reality, I can’t.

Such is the case with today’s album, 1985’s Ice on Fire, the first slump after two good and one decent Elton John albums.  While not a disaster by any means, it earned fairly limp reviews and middling sales, and isn’t thought of much these days, highly or otherwise.  Knowing this going in, it probably colored my experience a bit, but I never claimed to be totally unbiased anyway, so there!

So remember back on Too Low for Zero where I said that the 80s production felt like it enhanced the songs rather than hindered them?  Well, sadly, I can’t say the same about Ice on Fire, which is fairly drowning in 80s gloss for most of its runtime (…or would 80s gloss just be hairspray?  I dunno, I wasn’t alive yet).  This is interesting to me, because the album is also the first since Blue Moves to be produced by Gus Dudgeon, who had helmed the boards for all of Elton’s 70s classics. Bringing Dudgeon back into the fold would seem to signal a sort of back to basics approach, but alas, this is not the case.

Also, poor Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson were once again let go after Breaking Hearts, with seemingly little explanation.  It seems like a pattern was emerging, when Elton wanted a change of pace, he’d jettison his rhythm section and bring in some new players.  I’m not sure why the rhythm section had to bear the brunt of this, but this time the firing was permanent, at least for Murray, who died in 1992 having only contributed to one more album (Olsson would rejoin the fold a while later and remains a member of the band).  I read a pretty heartbreaking thing where Olsson admits that Murray went to his grave never really knowing why they were let go so abruptly, and seemed to be haunted by it for his last few years.

But I digress.  Onto the music!  The new-ish approach is signaled from the jump with “This Town,” a song about small town malaise over slinky synths and stuttery horns, which are probably also synthesized, but it’s honestly hard to tell sometimes because everything in the 80s is so processed.  Bernie Taupin’s lyrics paint an unsettling picture of being trapped in a cycle of poverty and crushing sameness, with Elton intoning in the chorus “chances are you’ll never leave this town.”  It’s a pretty chilling lyric that doesn’t quite match the upbeat instrumentation, but it’s nothing too offensive.

“Cry to Heaven” continues this aesthetic, with a dramatic ballad of the human cost of war, and the lives left to pick up the pieces.  Its heart’s in the right place, but it’s all a bit overwrought and occasionally too obvious, particularly in the last verse when Elton sings “I saw a black cat tease a white mouse / until he killed it with his claws / seems a lot of countries do the same thing / before they go to war.”  I feel like the image could’ve carried that subtext there, but maybe that’s just me.

Side 1 ends with the first single “Nikita,” a Cold War romance about lovers on two sides of the Iron Curtain.  It’s okay, but pretty limp as far as love songs go.

Things get a bit more fun on side 2, which is mostly made up of the kind of R&B pastiche songs that Elton could probably record in his sleep at this point.  While they’re a bit reductive of earlier songs, they’re a heck of a lot more fun to listen to than the songs on side 1, which could get a little self-serious.  Probably the most interesting is “Wrap Her Up,” a tongue-in-cheek song with some goofy falsetto backing vocals from the once and future King of Wham!, George Michael.

There’s something wonderfully surreal about listening to these two men, both of whom would eventually come out as gay, singing lyrics like “wrap her up, I’ll take her home with me…wrap her up, give her to me.”  It seems like the duo is relishing this bit of faux-hetero posturing; I’m speculating here, but it’s likely that they were both aware of their sexual orientation at this point, albeit still closeted, so I feel like this was likely a bit of fun for them, and that translates into the performance.  The fact that the song ends with them listing women they’d like to take home with them, some obvious (Brigitte Bardot, Rita Hayworth) some…not so much (Shirley Temple, Nancy Reagan), helps drive that home.  It’s goofy and silly, but manages to conjure a bit of that transgressive fun that made earlier Elton songs such a blast.

The rest of the side is mostly enjoyable but fairly forgettable soul/pop tracks, which is essentially the mode of the album.  Enjoyable, because this is Elton John we’re talking about, but not one I’m keen to revisit any time soon.

So on we go!  I’m morbidly curious to listen to the next album, which I’ve already read is the one Elton considers his worst.  There’s that research brain getting me in trouble again.