Ten ways to see the Elton story [playlist]

Sir Elton John is a living superlative, unequaled in music history in terms of global sales, awards, and career longevity. His catalogue is therefore vast, comprising some five hundred songs recorded over almost six decades. So why choose just these ten? Although the list overlaps with any greatest hits package or essentials playlist, it represents neither my claim for the best ten nor my personal ten favorites. Instead, I chose each track to kick off one of the ten chapters of On Elton John; each song prompts a story about Elton, each one is a window that offers a particular way of seeing him and his career.

1. I’m Still Standing (1983)

At 177 bpm, “I’m Still Standing” has the fastest tempo of any Elton single. An infectious global hit, it helped Too Low for Zero become John’s biggest album since his mid-1970s imperial phase. Elton called it confident and swaggering, and it landed as a bold comeback statement—even more so in his post-rehab 1990s. By the time of 2019’s Rocketman biopic, the song could be deployed as an exaltation of survival. But there is a twist. The title and lyrics are not about Elton at all. They were written by his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, and they refer to Bernie’s recovery from the end of a love affair. It was really Bernie who was “pickin’ up the pieces of my life,” who was “still standing.”

2. Someone Saved My Life Tonight (1975)

Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’s sole single, “Someone Saved My Life” was a long and melancholy hit. It narrates the 1967 incident when Taupin rescued John from an ill-considered engagement to the woman with whom he had chastely cohabited for six months. Suicidally miserable, John’s life was literally saved. Or was it? The suicide attempt was, as John later admitted, unconvincing. And in the song, it is Long John Baldry, not Taupin, who intervened to save his old friend. Baldry, secretly gay by necessity, spotted that John needed saving not from marrying the wrong woman, but from marrying any woman—a fact as obvious now as it was hidden then.

3. Rocket Man (1972)

“Rocket Man,” John’s first global smash, boosted his career into the stratosphere of stardom. By the mid-70s, he was the planet’s biggest-selling recording artist—on top of the world, not “lonely out in space.” As a song and as a branding device, “Rocket Man” has had a long shelf life, its title used in everything from hits compilations to his 2019 biopic, from John’s record label and its film and TV offshoot, to his fan club and a funding initiative with the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Its bleak lyrics have been buried by positive associations; John even performed it live at the 1998 launch of the space shuttle Discovery. In contrast to David Bowie, whose Starman metaphor evokes an otherworldly spaceman, Elton is an earthly superstar.

4. Philadelphia Freedom (1975)

Billie Jean King is one of the few living people for whom John and Taupin have written a song. “Philadelphia Freedom” was created when King was the coach and leading player of a mixed-gender tennis team called the Philadelphia Freedoms. John gave the song an upbeat pop-disco vibe, imagining it as an anthem for his friend’s team. But Taupin was stumped. As he’d yet to meet King, knew nothing about tennis, and was unfamiliar with Philadelphia, he delivered ambiguous lyrics that lent themselves to various causes. In the US, the song caught a rising tide of patriotism in the build-up to the Bicentennial. In Philly, it served as a civic anthem. And, as both King and John went from being closeted to out, the song steadily grew into an anthem of gay pride.

5. Electricity (2005)

As Elton’s sixty-third and latest solo Top 40 hit in the UK, “Electricity” saw him enter his second decade as a highly successful composer of songs for musicals, which started with 1994’s The Lion King. Part of the score for Billy Elliot: The Musical—a film-based stage musical for which John wrote all the music (to lyrics by Lee Hall)—the song represents John’s evolution through genres to a natural destination for him. Echoing his origins as a composer-for-hire of piano melodies, “Electricity” also reflects his love and mastery of the genre that is one of his true homes: musical theatre pop.

6. Border Song (1970)

“Border Song” was the first John single to chart anywhere (#29 in the Netherlands, #34 in Canada) and his first to chart in the US (a week at #92). But it was also covered by Aretha Franklin. She made the song her own, embracing its gospel/R&B potential, adding to its title the phrase that begins the song— “Holy Moses.” Franklin’s recording was bigger than John’s, peaking at US #37, getting further attention when it was included as the closing track on her Grammy-winning 1972 hit album, Young, Gifted and Black. Franklin’s recording also drew attention to the final lines and its deeply resonant sentiment: “There’s a man over there / what’s his color, I don’t care / he’s my brother, let us live in peace.”

7. Bennie and the Jets (1973)

What an iconic opening chord! Elton’s fingers are on the keys for just a second before he pauses, that fleeting sound instantly recognizable. Concert crowds roar, taking collective delight in the recognition of a single, uniquely odd set of notes. Their noise fills the brief silence before the band comes in, four beats later, with Elton now playing the intended chord, the “right” one. For that initial chord was never intended for the final version of “Bennie and the Jets.” It was a mistake made as John was finding the right notes in the studio, the tape already rolling. The producer and engineer retained it as a production cue to “fake-live” the whole song. Elton approved, keeping the perfect mistake as his own opening cue for half a century through to the final concerts of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour.

8. Candle in the Wind (1973; 1987; 1997)

“Candle in the Wind” has enjoyed a long life: three dates, three versions, three hits. It was originally a threnody—an elegy—to Marilyn Monroe. The E major melody that John composed for Taupin’s lyrics perfectly matched the topic of tragic celebrity, sentimental but just shy of saccharine. As a 1974 single, it reached #11 in the UK but was unreleased in the US. Yet its haunting and gently anthemic melody made it a fan favorite, and in 1987 it was chosen to promote John’s Live in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, hitting UK #5 and US #6. Its 1997 iteration would be its biggest, with lyrics rewritten by Taupin in honor of Princess Diana, her life cut short like Monroe’s at 36. Never performed again by Elton after Diana’s funeral, the studio version quickly became the best-selling single of all time worldwide.

9. Cold Heart (2021)

“Cold Heart” helped Elton break yet more records. A Top Ten hit in more than 40 countries, it made him the first solo artist to reach the UK Top 10 in six consecutive decades, and the oldest artist (aged 74) to hit #1 on the Australian singles chart. And it gave him the longest span (50 years and 10 months) of appearances in the US Top 40. All of which matters not simply because it is more data to add to Elton’s superlativeness. It matters because it matters to John himself, the consummate chart-watcher, the ultimate collector—of everything from vinyl records to chart records, art to artists whom he can collaborate with or mentor (like Dua Lipa, his partner here in “Cold Heart”).

10. This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore (2001)

 “This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore” is all about endings. A languid ballad built on Elton’s piano and vocals, the Songs from the West Coast closer was a single whose video featured Justin Timberlake as a young Elton— amusingly and poignantly invoking the theme of lost love and ageing. John leans into Taupin’s bitter-heartbreak lyrics, giving them his classic melodic piano treatment. Was this a perfect postscript to their lives and careers since the two first met in late-60s London—so full of promise and possibility, ready to be “riding on the storyline, furnace burning overtime”? It might have been, but John and Taupin kept writing together. John has repeatedly run out of steam, but he always gets going again. Musically and personally, Reg just keeps on striking back.

_{Featured image by Raph_PH. Cropped. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}