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Does Elton John Know His Lyrics?
Variety
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2 hours ago
Legendary singer/songwriter Elton John guesses iconic lyrics from his hit songs—including Rocketman, Tiny Dancer, and Your Song—and shares what actually goes into his songwriting process.
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00:00
I'm not very good at fighting probably, and I'm able to stand up and conduct the audience.
00:05
That's me in a nutshell. It's one of my favourite songs we've ever written,
00:08
and I never, never get tired of singing it.
00:16
I hope you don't mind that I put down in words how wonderful life is while you're in the world.
00:21
How many times have I sung that? And every time I sing it, it means the same to me.
00:26
It's such a beautiful line. It's a beautiful love song, your song,
00:29
which was on the Elton John album, my second album, but the first album to be released in America.
00:42
I've never, ever got tired of singing those lyrics. They're so beautiful and so romantic,
00:47
and they mean more to me now because I'm in the most wonderful relationship with David,
00:50
and we've been together 33 years this year, with my kids as well.
00:53
It never gets old. It's such a beautiful, beautiful love song.
00:56
And that's the great thing about Torpin, is he writes lyrics that remain as fresh as they were when he first wrote them.
01:03
And that is something to be very, very proud of, and I'm very lucky to be able to write with people like that.
01:09
Count the Headlights on the Highway.
01:10
It's a song about Los Angeles, Tiny Dancer.
01:12
It's from the Madman Across the Water album.
01:14
When you first go to California, and you drive along the freeway in a car with the hood down,
01:26
and it's one of the most beautiful things you can ever remember.
01:28
And then if you do it at night, if you're going along Pacific Coast Highway, for example,
01:33
and you count the headlights, and it's just, I don't know,
01:35
it sums up the romanticism of Los Angeles during the summer months,
01:40
and it always reminds me of L.A.
01:42
For me, it's the perfect Los Angeles song, Tiny Dancer.
01:46
I'm not the man they think I am at home.
01:48
Rocket Man.
01:53
Rocket Man was from Honky Chateau.
01:55
It was the first song with my new band.
01:57
We moved away from the orchestral album-sounding songs to a group album.
02:02
David Johnson joined the band,
02:03
and it had a completely different sound to the Elton John, Tomberweed, and Madman albums.
02:08
This is a beautiful, wistful song about being an astronaut.
02:11
You can imagine what it's like up there, the loneliness.
02:13
You probably have to go through so many different thoughts
02:16
while you're up there on your own, thinking of people down below.
02:20
I don't know.
02:20
It's just, I don't know what it means, really.
02:23
It's like what you go through psychologically to be up there in a spaceship on your own,
02:27
and what you're thinking about.
02:29
You must go through so many different thoughts and so many different feelings.
02:32
And again, a beautiful, poignant lyric that never, never gets old.
02:35
Every time I sing it, it means something different to me.
02:38
So I'm very lucky to have that sort of lyric to sing to.
02:42
I Would Die on a Hill in a One-Handed Fight is a lyric from Who Believes in Angels,
02:46
which is from the same album with Brian D. Carlisle.
02:50
I would die on a hill in a one-handed fight.
02:53
She wrote the lyric.
02:54
I don't really know what it means.
02:55
It means I'm not very good at fighting, probably.
02:58
I would die on a hill in a one-handed fight.
03:00
I would die for what I believed in.
03:02
That's what I think he believes in.
03:03
It really means.
03:06
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid is, I'm still standing.
03:14
That's me in a nutshell.
03:15
I mean, I am a true survivor, and I'm also a little kid underneath.
03:19
I've survived a lot of things in my life.
03:22
I'm trying to survive things at the moment.
03:24
And you just have to be an optimist, and you have to go back to being a kid and think of
03:29
yourself as having that kind of energy.
03:31
When you're a kid, you have so much energy.
03:33
When I started on the road in 1970 with the band, we had so much energy to burn.
03:37
And I still have that energy, and especially when I'm playing live on stage.
03:41
And I can pull faces, and I can look like a little kid.
03:43
But I am a true survivor.
03:44
Oh, there's a calm surrender to the rush of day is Can You Feel the Love Tonight from
03:50
The Lion King.
03:52
There's a calm surrender to the rush of day.
03:59
It's a beautiful first line written by Tim Rice.
04:02
When I sang that first line, when I wrote the song, the song came very, very quickly.
04:06
There's a calm surrender to the rush of day.
04:09
And it came to me so quickly, because that first line is such a beautiful description
04:14
of Africa.
04:16
Because when you're in Africa, and I've been many times, that feeling of when you get
04:20
up early in the morning to try and go and see the animals, and there is a cut.
04:24
Whatever's going to happen is going to happen.
04:26
And it's so beautiful and peaceful in the morning out there.
04:29
When Tim gave me that lyric, I was just so happy, because it reminded me of my trips
04:33
to Africa and the beautiful smell that is Africa.
04:36
So it was a very easy song to write, because of that very first line.
04:42
Oh, you almost had your hooks in me, didn't you, dear?
04:45
Yes.
04:46
Someone saved my life tonight from Captain Fantastic.
04:52
The Brown Dot Carboy, which was a very autobiographical album about what Bernie and I went through at
04:58
the start of our careers.
04:59
And it was very easy to write, because it was about both of us.
05:02
And so it was a story about how we got on when we first started and what we went through.
05:08
This was a song about somebody I nearly got married to, and she nearly got her hooks in
05:11
me, but she didn't.
05:13
And it's one of my favourite songs.
05:14
Someone saved my life tonight.
05:15
It's one of my favourite songs we've ever written, and I never, never get tired of singing
05:19
it.
05:21
Oh.
05:23
Something's Looking Better, Baby, Just Passing Through.
05:25
It's from Cold Heart, the song I did with your lipper.
05:28
Something's looking better, baby, Just Passing Through.
05:35
It's an amalgamation of Sacrifice and Rocket Man, which was on the Sleeping With The Past
05:39
album, which was actually my first number one single in England on my own.
05:43
I just loved doing that record with you.
05:45
It never, it's just so much fun.
05:47
I'd never done a real proper dance track before then, and it just worked out so well.
05:51
And again, I usually close the show with that.
05:53
And it's different from the rest of the set, because I play to a tape, and I sing to a
05:57
backing track, and I'm able to stand up and conduct the audience.
06:02
Tonight we touched on things that were never spoken is from the last song, which is a lyric
06:07
that Bernie wrote about HIV and AIDS, about a young son and his father.
06:11
And his son, the son coming to the father and saying, listen, this is what's happening.
06:15
I'm dying of AIDS.
06:24
I cried when I wrote this song because the lyric was so personal, because I'd lost so
06:27
many friends to AIDS.
06:28
And the video was shot by Gus Van Zandt, and it was a so beautiful video.
06:32
I don't really sing it anymore, because for me, it's very upsetting.
06:36
It's like the John Lennon song, Empty Garden.
06:38
It's too personal and too painful to sing.
06:40
But it's a beautiful song and a beautiful lyric, and I'm very proud of that song.
06:46
The AIDS Foundation was set up in 1991 in Atlanta, Georgia.
06:53
And it was set up because I'd done so many things for AIDS prior to that, concerts, benefits,
06:58
and I saw the amount of money being raised and the amount of money being wasted.
07:02
And also, as a gay man, I hadn't really stood up and done anything active, like ACT UP
07:08
or something like that.
07:09
So when I got sober in 1990, I wanted to rectify that by doing something positive with my life.
07:15
So I started the Elton John Lennon Foundation at my table in the kitchen in Atlanta, and
07:20
it was started with just two people, three people.
07:22
It involved direct serving people with food, delivering food, and we wanted to help people
07:28
as quickly as possible.
07:29
There was no antiretrovirals then.
07:32
People were dying.
07:33
It was only AZT.
07:34
And so it was a very, very tough period to start the foundation.
07:39
But as time has gone on and science has moved forward, we've seen remarkable changes and a
07:45
remarkable growth of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has given over $650 million to AIDS so
07:51
far.
07:52
And it's something I'm so proud of.
07:53
It helped turn me around from being a drunk and a drug addict to being someone with empathy
07:58
and someone with a mission in my life to do something good instead of waste it on being
08:02
an alcoholic or whatever.
08:04
I'm incredibly proud of it.
08:05
And we have a great team of people working for it.
08:07
And we've done so many, helped so many millions of people.
08:11
It's tough now because, you know, with COVID and other things coming in, AIDS tends to be
08:15
sometimes forgotten about it.
08:17
But we're still fighting to keep our head above the water.
08:19
And we're battling for everyone who has HIV and AIDS.
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