Elton John doesn’t really need to worry about getting any more accomplished as a musician if he doesn’t want to.
He’s already received some of the highest accolades that any musician could dream of in the pop sphere, and even if you take his hits out of the equation, his work on Broadway and in film is still some of the most classic tunes of all time. Chances are, anyone would have gladly traded places with him if they could, but the reason why John works so well in every generation is that he never truly stopped being a fan of music.
You have to remember that this was the kid who used to follow the charts religiously every single time he turned on the radio back in the day. He wanted to hear anything and everything that was catchy, and while he didn’t exactly appreciate every hit that he heard, he kept up his habit even after becoming one of the biggest names on the charts. It was nice to see him and Bernie Taupin’s songs at the top of the hit parade, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still appreciate people like Laura Nyro and Leon Russell as well.
To him, it was always about finding a good song, and even when the singer-songwriter scene started to go out of style, there was always going to be someone trying to twist their songs in a new direction. The glam period may have been John’s time to shine when rubbing elbows with everyone from David Bowie to Freddie Mercury to Marc Bolan, but the reason he lasted for so long was because of the depth of his songwriting.
There was a lot more going on than simple rock and roll whenever he played, and when he started working with Disney, he got to flex his muscles a lot more than usual. Not many artists were able to make songs that crossed genre boundaries or used strange old-timey chords throughout the tune, but John was the one making everything sound so effortless from the minute he got a lyric sheet in front of him.
But by the time he was working on projects like The Lion King, the songwriter scene had begun to spread out a bit more. The alternative wave was still among the biggest genres in the world, but aside from the adult alternative acts like Hootie and the Blowfish or the middle-aged rock of Marc Cohn, Rufus Wainwright was the one putting together musical masterpieces every single time he got behind the piano.
There’s an entire generation that only knows Wainwright from his version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ from Shrek, but even without having that many hits, John said that the young pianist played the songs that he wished he could make, saying, “Jealousy is the wrong word. Envious of their talent, [I’d say] someone like Rufus Wainwright who writes these melodies and these symphonic type songs. [He’s] phenomenal.”
And it’s not hard to say Wainwright as being a more seasoned version of what John would have been doing around his age. It’s still the same type of singer-songwriter tunes, but Wainwright seemed to start his career with the same kind of depth that John had during the era of Madman Across the Water, complete with the kind of arrangements that would have made any other veteran want to go back to the drawing board.
But even if John feels like Wainwright has him beat in some respects, it’s almost reassuring to see him taking cues from the new kids or finding time to work with other songwriters like Brandi Carlile. Any other legend would have gladly retired and stopped listening to the radio by now, so it’s nice to see someone like John thinking of ways that he could still improve his craft.
