Elton John's 50 best songs (& 51 fine cover versions)

A deep dive in the catalog of Captain Fantastic, my favorite musician when I was 12.

Rolling Stone magazine asked me to make a list of the 50 best Elton John songs and annotate them. That feature just posted to their site today. It was a lot of work, involving a lot of research. And it was a lot of fun.

Elton John was my first favorite musician. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was my second-ever LP purchase (after Jesus Christ Superstar). I saved up my allowance and gave the money to my dad, who bought it for me at a Times Square record store on his lunch hour. I can only imagine the looks the clerk gave my dad — an original Mad Men — in his Brooks Brothers gear, asking for the season’s biggest glam-rock hit. (His own discerning tastes were squarely in jazz; Ben Webster was his gold standard.)

Here’s what I wrote in the Rolling Stone feature about Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’s opening track(s), “Love Lies Bleeding/Funeral For A Friend” (#6):

The tag-teaming overture to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is one of prog-rock’s supreme moments, with its swirling ARP synthesizer chords, Johnstone’s smeared-mascara glam riffs, and Elton’s phenomenal piano performance. A frequent show opener in the mid-Seventies, with Elton’s name flickering in blue neon above him, the opening instrumental was an impressively ghoulish attempt to write music he’d like played at his own funeral, complete with wind-in-the-graveyard sound effects. Stately at first, then galloping into the furious rock & roll jailbreak of “Love Lies Bleeding,” it was a spangled dirge exploded into pomp ceremony that drove home a key lesson of the Elton John catalog: Even great tragedies do not preclude fabulousness.

And this, about “Candle In The Wind,” which follows it on the album and on my list (#7)

Elton’s delivery of this song’s A Star Is Born narrative manages to be simultaneously rueful and spectacular, with choral vocals befitting a church service — a funeral for a friend, indeed […] Taupin initially heard the title phrase of this threnody hymn — which features some of Elton’s most gorgeous melodies — used as a posthumous reference to Janis Joplin. And in shaping the album’s cinematic themes, he originally had doomed actor Montgomery Clift as the song’s subject, wisely pivoting to Clift’s better-known co-star Marilyn Monroe. A Top 10 hit in both the U.K. and the U.S., the song was reimagined as “Candle in the Wind 1997” in tribute to Princess Diana following her death — essentially a commission from the royal family. With new lyrics by Taupin, Elton performed the remake during Diana’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, recording it the same day with Beatles maestro George Martin producing. The charity single sold vast numbers worldwide. But the original remains the definitive version, the last panel in an opening triptych that is among the grandest opening sequences of any rock LP.

I learned a lot researching this feature, especially about the stories behind Elton’s songs. I gained a new appreciation for a songwriter and performer who is often dismissed as a pop lightweight. And I discovered a lot of great cover versions — some of them quite unlikely — by artists who are obviously big Elton fans.

Paid subscribers will find two playlists below (for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube Music). One features Elton’s original versions of the top 50 (with bonus versions). The other compiles all sorts of great cover versions of those same songs.

Here are two of my favorites. The first is “Candle In The Wind” by Kate Bush, a fellow English piano player who owes Elton plenty artistically, and even upstaged him at his own wedding (a funny story Elton shares in his great, cheekily-titled memoir Me). The other cover version, which I’d never heard before last month, is from a super-rare 45 rpm single issued in 1972 by Big Black. No, it’s most definitely not Steve Albini’s Big Black. Nor does the record involve, as far as I can tell, the bebop-cum-free jazz drummer Daniel “Big Black” Ray. This crew, also known as Big Black and the Congregation, may have been from Chicago, though I’ve found next-to-no information about them other than the fact this single commands high prices on the U.K. northern soul market. If you can shine a light, please do in the comments.

In any case, it’s a tasty version of Honky Chateau’s “Mellow” (#20), of which I noted:

With lines like “wreckin’ the sheets” and “rocking smooth and slow,” plus those outrageous falsetto squeals on the outro, this is arguably Elton’s sexiest song. Taupin wrote the lyrics in reference to getting cozy with his first wife, Maxine Feibelman (a.k.a. “Tiny Dancer”). Elton delivered them like a man in heat, with clear admiration for the vocal glides of Ray Charles and Leon Russell. Recorded at the Honky Château (Château d’Hérouville) in France, a nation that always brings out the sexy, “Mellow” slinks and slides, zhuzhed up with an electric violin solo by jazzbo native son Jean-Luc Ponty played through a Leslie speaker, which is why it kind of sounds like the Band’s Garth Hudson playing organ. And while the lyrics mention only beer, it remains an unsurprising fave among cannabis fans.

Enjoy, Will