Elton John Admits He Was a Nightmare for Brandi Carlile

Elton John admitted he’d been a nightmare for Brandi Carlile as the pair worked on their album Who Believes in Angels?

It arrives on April 4 after they revealed they’d started out with the idea of emulating the partnership between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, before deciding to do something that felt like more of a risk.

“[O]ne day he says, ‘Let’s not be any of that,’” Carlile told the The Guardian in a new interview. “‘Let’s just be ourselves – and we don’t know what that is. Don’t write, don’t do anything in advance.’ And that’s when it got really dangerous.”

READ MORE: Underrated Elton John: The Most Overlooked Song From Every Album

John – who was enduring a head injury along with hip and knee surgery at the time – explained that he didn’t want to cancel the studio sessions, helmed by Andrew Watt. “I was tired, I didn’t feel well and I was extremely nervous,” John said. “And that nervousness caused quite a few sparks to fly.”

Carlile added detail: “He smashed his iPad. He smashed headphones. There were really amazing, classic Elton John outbursts. My lyrics got torn up and thrown on the ground – he goes, ‘Fuck off, Brandi.’ He would yell, ‘Predictable! Cliche!’”

John explained: “It wasn’t me being anxious about other people; it was me being anxious about me. Once we got through the first three songs, we knew we had something. And I was much more relaxed… but I was a bit of a nightmare.”

Brandi Carlile Says Elton John Definitely Crossed Line

Carlile said there were “definitely points” when she felt John had crossed a line – but reflected that it provided a certain advantage to working with one of her heroes. “Elton doesn’t want to be put on a pedestal,” she said. “He doesn’t like listening to stories of my childhood love for him. There was so much riding on my perception of Elton, versus who Elton really is.”

She added of the work that delivered the album: “He would start singing and cutting shit or saying words the wrong way, and I would get in and fix the issue… You don’t stop Elton; you frantically replace the lyric in front of him and then he’s singing that. It was really volatile, but really cool.”