The 50 Best Elton John Songs

This bedroom disco gem is a mashup of “Rocket Man,” arguably Elton’s greatest song, and latter-day jewel “Sacrifice,” with bits of “Where’s the Shoorah?” and “Kiss the Bride” tossed in for good measure. Woven together by the Australian electronic-music trio Pnau, with Elton’s pal and countrywoman Dua Lipa singing the “Rocket Man” hook, it was released on 2021’s The Lockdown Sessions during the second summer of Covid, and topped charts worldwide, becoming possibly the most-streamed Elton jam in history, with 2 billion-plus plays on Spotify alone at last check. The pandemic present spawned an acoustic version, too, proving its construction was just as tight off the (real or imagined) dance floor.

Elton’s 21st-century output is slim pickings for top-shelf LPs, as even longtime lyricist-wingman Taupin acknowledged in his memoir — noting, however, that the “best of the bunch was probably 2013’s The Diving Board.” Produced by studio minimalist T Bone Burnett (who also helmed Elton’s collaborative summit with his hero turned friend Leon Russell, The Union) the lyrics on this highlight are among Taupin’s latter-day best, the lament of a man evidently skilled at self-made disasters (“​​So don’t you know I’ve been dressed to kill/If you got the tools be careful what you build”). Centered on Elton and his piano, it boasts an impressively jazzy break with Jay Bellerose’s drums and Raphael Saadiq’s bass — an old-school flex by a piano player who loves to flash his musical bonafides.   

Supposedly about Elton’s short-lived marriage to German sound engineer Renate Blauel, who he wed in 1984 during his struggles with substance abuse, this standout on 2001’s Songs From the West Coast is orchestrated by Elton’s longtime collaborator Paul Buckmaster, the string arranger known for his work with David Bowie (“Space Oddity”) and Leonard Cohen (Songs of Love and Hate), who began working with Elton on his 1970 self-titled album. A return to form for both men. 

The opening track from The Captain and the Kid, Elton’s 2006 autobiographical concept album about his long running-partnership with Taupin, is a flashback to the early ‘Seventies, when they were starstruck in the U.S.A. and on the rise, while a presumably-criminal president was on the way down. “A little camouflage and glue to mask the evil that men do,” Elton sings, fantasizing about Richard Nixon welcoming the duo to America, adding, “I’ve gotta go but you can stay.” A deep cut with a dash of Randy Newman that’s refreshingly off-brand.

Taupin once described this over-the-top simile from Rock of the Westies as a “knife-in-the-back love song.” Writing about another failed union — here, his own marriage — Taupin crafted a murder-ballad-as-metaphor, which played out via Elton’s incongruously sweet melody and wildly tortured falsetto. A tasty George Harrison-esque slide-guitar solo on the back end by Elton’s longtime pointman Davey Johnstone was icing on the cake. Issued as a double-A-sided single in 1976 with “Grow Some Funk of Your Own,” it got up into the upper reaches of the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and even hit Number 21 on the Easy Listening chart, despite the uneasy sentiment.

Taupin says this song was inspired by the 1968 British film The Killing of Sister George, a darker retelling of a successful, ahead-of-its-time stage comedy involving a dysfunctional queer relationship. The potent if questionable film, which featured a young Susannah Yorke as Alice, became a camp classic. This song goes darker still. But tragic-homosexual stereotypes notwithstanding, it’s a bold and brave one thematically, and Elton (who described it bluntly in his memoir as “a song about a 16-year-old lesbian who ends up dead in a subway”) delivers it with compelling empathy amid the rest of the cinematic storytelling on his 1973 landmark Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Elton’s made plenty of memorable duet and tag-team recordings, with partners from Kiki Dee to Mary J. Blige, and Eminem to Nicki Minaj. He first leaned hard into pas de deux pop on his 1993 Duets LP. It opens on this collab with k.d. lang, a kindred spirit with a stunning voice, on a cover of the 1988 Womack and Womack hit, which he and lang transform into a lavish disco-rific throwback, with string arrangements courtesy of black-tie jazz-pop guru Arif Mardin. Elton’s voice blends seamlessly with lang’s sequinned soul, which was impressively out of character and laser-guided. 

On very rare occasions, Elton composed songs entirely on his own, without a lyricist. One Sunday in the Seventies, “gloomy and hungover,” as he confessed in his memoir, “I wrote an instrumental that fitted my mood, and kept singing one line of lyrics over the top: ‘Life isn’t everything’. The next morning I found out that a boy called Guy Burchett, who worked for Rocket [Record Co.], had died in a motorbike crash at virtually the same time I was writing the song, so I called it ‘Song For Guy.’” An elegant, elegiac piano melody that builds rhythmically over nearly seven minutes amid billowing synth chords, this was the standout on A Single Man. And while the song’s an outlier in his catalog, it became a European hit years later, and became a favorite of his pal Gianni Versace — a superstar designer who knows tasty baroque excess when he sees it, or in this case hears it.

Elton’s first great song, from his debut LP, Empty Sky. For his first single, however, his management chose “I’ve Been Loving You,” a comparatively cheesy early effort suggesting a better-than-average bubblegum-pop radio hit. But after more derivative throat-clearing, he wrote “Skyline Pigeon” with Taupin. It was a stylistic breakthrough, with a poetic ambition and melodic sophistication that, according to Taupin, had the duo “feeling like we’d turned a corner.” Elton was similarly thrilled at the fact that he “couldn’t think of anyone else it sounded like — we’d finally made something that was our own.” The original version, played on harpsichord with touches of organ, was released in 1969 on Empty Sky, an album recorded under the influence of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (albeit less so than Regimental Sgt. Zippo, Elton’s shelved 1968 LP, finally issued in 2021). There would be many covers, but the best may be Elton’s own — the piano-centered orchestrated version, recorded during the Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player sessions, that turned up on the B side of the hit Daniel.

Another highlight of The Diving Board is this virtually solo showpiece. “Elton’s piano [provided] the album’s heartbeat,” Taupin wrote in his memoir. “[He] is a magnificent player, and it’s unfortunate at times that his celebrity and larger-than-life persona overshadows the fact.” This elegy, with its processional tone, conjures images of fallen veterans, and the white-haired survivors of the Great Generation heading off into the sunset. Lyrically and musically, it’s the highlight of an album both men were proud of. “I’m horribly critical of the things I’ve written and rarely ever satisfied 100 percent, but with The Diving Board there’s an essence of literature in a lot of the work,” wrote Taupin. Indeed, no Elton John record sounds quite like it.

Elton’s longtime obsession with the American South crested with a move to Atlanta in the Nineties, where he kept a U.S. home base for decades, and following his Southern-themed 2006 album, Peachtree Lane, he collaborated with his hero Leon Russell for an even better album with similar roots. The Union, arguably his greatest 21st-century LP, unspooled a wide-screen version of the Band’s Music From Big Pink — style songcraft he and Taupin favored in the Seventies. This story-song about the Civil War is its crown jewel, with lyrics penned by Taupin in part during a trip to Savannah, Georgia, where he was consumed with thoughts of Gen. William T. Sherman’s bloody 1864 March to the Sea. The result was a “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”-style narrative, with Elton, Russell, and special guest Neil Young each taking a verse.

This gem from Caribou triangulates the Beatles, David Bowie, and Elton’s own “Rocket Man,” revisiting themes of interstellar FOMO from the perspective of an earthbound daydreamer. With glam-rock guitar flourishes, congas, and a gong, Elton contemplates UFO sightings, teases double-meaning from his pronunciation of “flying in formation/ flying information” on the chorus, and gleefully rhymes “static” with “satanic.” It’s the songwriting duo at their most playfully spaced-out. 

Randy Newman meets Isaac Hayes on this torch ballad from Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, with images of shackled prisoners fleeing captivity while hounds follow in pursuit. The mid-crescendo string-section introduction, arranged by the great orchestrator Paul Buckmaster, is one of the fiercest opening passages in Elton’s catalog, and Davey Johnstone’s electric-guitar heroism suggests “Layla” with a touch of “Yer Blues.” A live fave that Elton revived for his legendary tour with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, who helped throw its Southern gothic drama into high relief.

Another Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player highlight, a prescient tribute to the kitschy rock & roll of the late Fifties and early Sixties, which was poised for a major revival: The triple-platinum soundtrack to the film American Graffiti was released later that year, and the hit TV show Happy Days began airing in 1974. A delightfully wild performance, goofy and irresistible, it’s all the more remarkable for the fact that Elton was battling mono during the sessions. You can hear echoes of classic songs in the architecture — and unfortunately for Elton, some folks heard enough of Pat Boone’s 1962 hit “Speedy Gonzales” (NB: the “la la la la la” chorus) that they sued for copyright infringement. The fact that it became Elton’s first Number One hit and first gold single, however, probably cushioned the blow.

With due respect to “Crocodile Rock,” its B side is the rockin’-est jam on Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player — a glammy sad-sack rave-up about loneliness punched up with brass and Elton’s hammering Fats Domino-style chord progression. A longtime live favorite, it opened Elton’s crowning Sept. 7, 1973, Hollywood Bowl gig, which was preceded by a flamboyant intro courtesy of porn star Linda Lovelace, and the release of dozens of white doves from five multicolored grand pianos, whose raised tops spelled out E-L-T-O-N. An over-the-top star is born.

Davey Johnstone’s sweet George Harrison-esque slide — especially impressive from a guitarist who’d never played electric before — and echoes of Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” distinguish another of Elton’s great rockers. Recorded at the Château d’Hérouville during the Honky Chateau sessions, it marked the start of a new approach to record making, as Elton recalled in his memoir: “It was the first time I’d tried to record an album with my touring band rather than crack session musicians; the first time that Davey had picked up an electric guitar; the first time we’d had the money to record abroad, in a residential studio.” His confidence became so great, in fact, he’d legally change his name from Reg Dwight to Elton Hercules John. “I’d always thought middle names were slightly ridiculous, so I did the most ridiculous thing I could think of and took mine from the rag-and-bone man’s horse in the sitcom Steptoe and Son,” he wrote, “leaving Reg Dwight behind [and] fully becoming the person I was supposed to be.”

Like Lou Reed’s Berlin, an album written before Reed ever visited Germany, Elton and Taupin wrote their great 1970 Americana concept album, Tumbleweed Connection, before they’d ever visited the U.S., inspired by cowboy films, Marty Robbins’ borderland hit “El Paso,” and the songs of the Band. One of Elton’s funkiest early jams, “Amoreena” is the first song to feature his future rhythm team, Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson, with deep-groove guitar by legendary session man Caleb Quaye. Never released as a single, it became a deep-catalog fave — Elton’s early-career manager Ray Williams named his daughter for the song, and Phish even opened a memorable show with it in the summer of 1997.

In his memoir, Taupin describes the first time he and Elton met Bob Dylan, backstage at the Fillmore East in 1970, when Elton was opening for Leon Russell. “It was post his motorcycle wreck, and Bob Dylan looked like the Woodstock and Nashville Dylan, scraggly chin beard, short curly hair, and that smile somewhere between sly knowing and cultivated shyness. He complimented us on the Tumbleweed Connection album, and in particular, how much he liked the lyrics to ‘My Father’s Gun.’” Elton’s response to that initial meeting with their supreme hero, as he recalled in his own memoir, was basically “What the fuck is happening?” With a muted electric-guitar line slithering through the song like a water snake, mournful Dixieland brass, and churchy backing vocals from a chorus that included soul queens Madeline Bell and Dusty Springfield, Elton sings about riverboats goin’ down to New Orleans as if he’d been riding them all of his life — imagination’s a potent thing.

This midtempo gem from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — following “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” “Candle In the Wind,” “Bennie and the Jets,” and the title track — is the record’s “holy shit” moment, when you wonder if there are any less-than-brilliant songs on the entire double LP (there are, but not many). A portrait of the artist as a hungry young wannabe, it’s one of the greatest songs ever about wanting to inhale all the knowledge and experience life has to offer, yearning verses with a Beatlesque, chamber-music chorus, all wrapped up in a tidy two-and-a-half-minute package. (Sidenote: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road got bumped out of the top 100 on the most recent update of this magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and some of us would like a recount.)

​​With a lyrical nod to the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” and a musical nod to the reigning Philly soul sound, this hit is Elton’s first lean into proto-disco, with strings and a relentless 4/4 beat. Inspired by the dance-floor soundtracks of the New York City gay clubs he liked to dance at, it was one of mainstream disco’s earliest hits, recorded in the summer of 1974, reaching Number One on the charts by the spring of 1975. According to Elton, it’s “one of the few songs I ever commissioned Bernie to write. Normally, I just let him write lyrics about whatever he wanted — we’d learned we couldn’t really write to order back in the days when we kept trying to write singles for Tom Jones or Cilla Black and failing miserably — but Billie Jean King had asked me to write a theme song for her tennis team, the Philadelphia Freedoms.” Elton couldn’t refuse, as King was one of his best friends. Taupin, however, wasn’t keen on writing about tennis, so he wrote about the City of Brotherly Love instead, which would fit Elton’s music to a T. The song’s Philly-soul sound was so legit, in fact, it got him an invite to perform on the flagship Black music TV show Soul Train — the first white artist to do so.

Honky Chateâu, Elton’s first Number One album on the Billboard Hot 100, was playful and giddy, with lots of jazzy flourishes — French violinist Jean Luc Ponty even made some guest appearances to add some authentic Hot Club vibes. This semi-title track also had a Southern soul/Muscle Shoals feel, with banjo by Davey Johnstone, Elton’s barrelhouse piano pumping, and brass from some French session dudes who didn’t speak English, but figured out their marching orders just fine. In the wake of “Rocket Man,” this single cemented Elton’s status as a hitmaker to be reckoned with.

This beautifully lush, string-wrapped version of the Ray Charles classic was Leonard Cohen’s choice for his turn on Elton’s Duets project, and it makes for quite the study in contrasts. It opens with church organ, piano, and pedal steel weaving the melody over brush drums under Cohen’s opening verse. Then Elton comes in with strings. The vibe isn’t far from the version on Brother Ray’s 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, clearly the touchstone here. But when the men trade lines on the final verse, and Cohen speak-sings “Born to lose/And now, Elton, I’m losing you” in his signature baritone purr, you know you’re in different territory.

Best as Taupin recalls, this song’s lyrics were seeded by memories of a Lincolnshire, England, pub called the Aston Arms, where the Saturday-night parking-lot scene got pretty wild. “Apparently, there’s a plaque there now indicating that this is where I did indeed conjure up the kernel of a seed that grew into our rowdy classic. I’m not sure that’s altogether true, but […] I think many of its references are indebted to this drinking establishment.” With lines like “I’m a juvenile product of the working class/Whose best friend floats in the bottom of a glass,” this Goodbye Yellow Brick Road rocker wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Who’s Quadrophenia, released the same month. But Elton’s delivery, with its falsetto peaks and “ooo-woo-woo-woo”s in the chorus, makes a pub brawl sound more like a vogue battle. Fun fact: the Who eventually covered it on the 1991 tribute album Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

A churchy early jam with red-hot piano, steeped in the country-soul/gospel-rock sound Elton was obsessed with early on. A highlight of his second album, Elton John, which earned him a Best Album of the Year nomination at the 1971 Grammys, his first brush with a ceremony he’d make regular appearances at in years to come. The A side of a single backed with “Your Song,” the touchstone ballad B side that which would overshadow it, “Take Me to the Pilot” remains one of his greatest barnburners — even if neither Elton nor Taupin himself knew what the hell the lyrics meant. Country rockers Brothers Osbourne brought it all back home in 2018 on the multi-artist tribute Restoration: The Songs of Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Elton issued this great mid-tempo ballad twice, in two fairly different versions. The first was the B side of “Rock and Roll Madonna,” a one-off single pairing recorded during the sessions for his self-titled 1970 LP in hopes of scoring a hit. “Rock and Roll Madonna” never charted, but the superior “Grey Seal” would be reborn on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Elton dropped the electric piano intro, cranked up the tempo, and lost the woozy orchestral outro in favor of a fiery, funky piano-guitar-keyboard rave-up with echoes of Stevie Wonder’s recently released Talking Book. “Grey Seal” would bloom further onstage into one of Elton’s hottest mid-Seventies live jams.

The sessions for this megahit, recorded at George Martin’s studio on Montserrat, reunited the Elton John Band for the first time since 1975’s Captain Fantastic, with Elton’s interest in synths and synth-pop spinning things in new directions. He described it in his memoir as “a big, swaggering, confident fuck-you of a song” directed at his new label, Geffen, who he had beef with. But it coincided with the peak of his drug-and-alcohol excesses, which crested, according to Elton, with a legendary black-out night of coke-fueled madness that began innocently enough during the song’s video shoot in southern France, when Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon invited Elton out for a vodka martini. After Elton cleaned up, the song became “synonymous as an anthem for Elton’s steely quest for survival (and quite rightfully so),” according to Taupin, who’d actually written it as a kiss-off to an ex. Like many great lyrics, they’ve proved endlessly mutable. When Taron Egerton performed the song in the animated film Sing, as Elton noted, it earned “a completely unexpected new audience: Suddenly, there were kids listening to it, and making films of themselves dancing to its chorus on TikTok.”

This laid-back Tumbleweed Connection beauty has been one of Elton’s most covered early songs, notably by Rod Stewart, who cut a version for his second solo album, Gasoline Alley, released before Elton’s own version came out in the U.S. He wasn’t thrilled: “[Rod] changed the lyrics, something I complained about at length in the press: ‘He sounds like he made it up as he went along! He couldn’t have got further from the original if he’d sung “The Camptown Races”!’” Elton recounted in his memoir. (Nevertheless, the two party animals soon became great friends.) The great Southern soul man Brook Benton covered it too, with less contention, as did country singers from Juice Newton to John Anderson and Keith Urban. Still, Elton’s remains the gold standard, even if some verses seem incongruous coming from a kid raised in outer London.

This highlight from Too Low for Zero, the album that pulled Elton out of a slump in the Eighties, was written as a declaration of love from Taupin to his wife at the time. Elton delivers it with a smoldering swagger and a dash of doo-wop drama, with Stevie Wonder adding jazzy harmonica at the tail end. Over the years, it’s struck a note with women singers in particular. Mary J. Blige turned up the heat in a duet on Elton’s live One Night Only in 2000 (and the unreleased studio recording), turning the couplet “rolling like thunder/Under the covers” into a multiple orgasm of vowels, while the late, great Melanie transformed the song into a soaring folk-rock benediction. 

This single came out of Elton’s collaboration on The Lion King with English musical theater master Sir Tim Rice. And while Elton saw his task as not so different from composing for a concept album like Captain Fantastic, he confessed in his memoir to his doubts about the project: “You know, I wrote ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight.’ I wrote ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.’ I wrote ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.’ And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot.” That song was “Hakuna Matata.” This one was a titanic Disney weeper involving a hot date between lions. Elton’s single version rehumanized it, with Rick Astley and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” sidekick Kiki Dee adding backing vocals. It had legs; Beyoncé and Childish Gambino would later duet on a remake. In the end, Elton was “incredibly proud” of the Lion King project, which did rather well: The original film became one of the highest grossing of all time, and the stage version became the single most successful theatrical production in the history of Broadway. On top of it all, his song won an Oscar, the film soundtrack sold more than 18 million copies, and as an added bonus, “it kept [Voodoo Lounge] off the number-one spot in America all through the summer of 1994,” Elton noted in his memoir, referencing his ongoing pissing match with the Stones. “I tried not to be too delighted when I heard that Keith Richards was furious, grumbling about being ‘beaten by some fuckin’ cartoon.’”

This aching beacon on the otherwise misdirected Jump Up! LP was written by Elton and Taupin about their friend John Lennon in the wake of his 1980 murder. Taupin, grief-stricken, had essentially locked himself in his office for two days, working on the verses. “It was a great lyric,” Elton later observed. “Not mawkish or sentimental — Bernie knew John too, and knew he [would have] hated anything like that.” Elton’s music, built on simple piano chords, has glimmers of Lennon’s style, building potently with harpsichord, synths, and (in an impressively cheeky twist) castanets into a tribute more anthemic than weepy. It’s remained one of Elton’s favorite songs, though it’s emotionally difficult to play live. “I really loved John,” he admitted, “and when you love someone that much, I don’t think you ever quite get over their death.”

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.

The highlight of the excellent, if slept-on, EP The Thom Bell Sessions was recorded with the late, great maestro of Philly soul and the producer-arranger-songwriter behind a truckload of classics by the Spinners, the Stylistics, and the Delfonics. If this gem sounds like one of those, chalk it up to Elton’s love of the subgenre, as well as the song itself (written by Thom Bell’s songwriting nephew LeRoy Bell and sidekick Casey James, a.k.a. soul duo Bell and James) and the backing vocals, courtesy of the Spinners. The sessions ended on a slightly sour note (the producer reportedly wanted Elton to sing in a lower register), but the results were sweet as pie.   

Another song created under the influence of the Band’s Music From Big Pink — one that conjures images of Native American resistance like the 1824 Chumash Revolt in the future state of California — with a loping mid-tempo singalong that builds to a rave-up before dropping back down to a ballad. Elton and the band stretched it out to epic lengths live — check out the 18-minute version issued on 17-11-70, a jaw-dropping performance for a live 1970 radio broadcast that veers into Elvis Presley’s “My Baby Left Me” and the Beatles “Get Back” before it finally gives in. As Elton told Rolling Stone in 2017, “That was completely improvised, more or less, and I’m very proud of it: I think it’s one of the greatest live albums ever made.” Then again, it ain’t bragging when it’s the truth, and the song remained a live staple right up through his Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour.

Elton’s “New York State of Mind,” whose opening lines — with their rueful nod to Ben E. King’s hit “Spanish Harlem” — were written by Taupin in a Midtown hotel room during their first visit to the Big Apple, in 1970, shortly after the lyricist witnessed the bloody aftermath of a police shooting from his fourth-floor hotel window. The song was finished many months later, when Taupin’s perspective had brightened considerably. “My ‘trash-can dream’ did come true and ‘rose trees’ do ‘grow in New York City,’” he’d write in his memoir. “The positivity hiding in the lyric emerged in the wake of the first two lines. It’s ultimately about searching for the light, and with the help of ‘people out there like you,’ it’s possible.” For his part, Elton brought a handsome vocal melody that, alongside Johnstone’s Mediterranean mandolin parts, radiated like springtime sunshine in Central Park.  

The title track of an album that, astonishingly, was widely trashed in the press (this magazine included) and that would go on to rank alongside his two or three greatest LPs. At its core, it’s a dark album about the excesses of fame and human appetite, with elements of autobiography. Not Elton’s, though. “[The lyrics] do say that I want to leave Oz and get back to the farm,” Taupin told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene in 2014. “I think that’s still my M.O. these days. I don’t mind getting out there and doing what everybody else was doing, but I always had to have an escape hatch.” (Elton concurred: “He was always the quiet one and the more thoughtful one. I was always the one that said, ‘Let’s go out!’”). Elton’s glammy performance, with its falsetto chorus, is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance — could anyone else make a couplet like “back to the howling old owl in the woods/Hunting the horny back toad” sound so simultaneously naive and nasty? An age-old narrative, the song went top 10 around the world, furthering the album’s success, and ensuring that neither Elton nor his writing partner were going back to the farm anytime soon.

Elton credits this song’s deep soul to the chops he picked up “backing Patti LaBelle and [Chicago R&B journeyman] Major Lance” with his band Bluesology in the Sixties. But he also notes “a classical influence that seeped in from all those Saturday mornings where I’d been forced to study Chopin and Bartók.” He also credits obsessive listening to the Delaney and Bonnie LP’s featuring his piano hero Leon Russell (who he’d record with decades later). Elton’s version on his self-titled second LP is stirring, a solo piano benediction that builds on orchestral strings and a choir, ending with a prayer — “He’s my brother/Let us live in peace” — that remains as timely as ever. It was never a hit, but he did get the satisfaction of his fellow English R&B scholar/queer icon Dusty Springfield offering to mime backing vocals on it with him for his Top of the Pops performance. And the song’s full greatness was revealed by no less than Aretha Franklin in the widescreen gospel-pop version on her 1972 landmark Young, Gifted and Black.

This Madman Across the Water highlight showcased Elton’s obsession with the Band, one he shared with Taupin (who, at last check, still considers Music From Big Pink his favorite rock record of all time). As Elton confided in his memoir “‘Chest Fever,’ ‘Tears of Rage,’ ‘The Weight’: This was what we craved to write.” His sidemen evidently studied the same texts, a future all-star cast of Brits including keyboardist Rick Wakeman (Yes), Terry Cox (Pentangle), and proto-punk guitar god Chris Spedding. “There ain’t no green grass in the U.S. state prison,” Elton sings against honky-tonk piano and Spedding’s weepy slide, conjuring a jailbird who’s had his fill of “cocaine and pills,” reckoned with his sins, and found “the light of the Lord,” which he illustrates on the rueful, come-to-Jesus singalong chorus. Sure, the Southern accent is a bit dubious, but the song’s so catchy and melodically compelling, you barely notice.  

One of Taupin’s very few “love songs in the traditional sense,” as he noted in his memoir, this adored song is one Elton initially hated — so much that he could barely get through the recording, and suggested scrapping it altogether (and pawning it off to noted cheesemonger Englebert Humperdink). But as he himself concedes, he’s never been the best judge of his own work, and the 1974 recording for Caribou reached Number Two on the Hot 100. In 1991, his live duet with pal George Michael became an even bigger hit, topping charts in the U.S., U.K., and across Europe, raising money for AIDS charities and other causes.

This lavish duet with Kiki Dee — a white British artist signed to Motown — was modeled in part on lush northern soul duets like Marvin Gay and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” He and Taupin wrote more than one song for the collaboration — another, per Elton’s memoir, “was called ‘I’m Always on the Bonk’: ‘I don’t know who I’m fucking, I don’t know who I’m sucking, but I’m always on the bonk.’” The choice was clear, although Taupin, terminally averse to “shallow pop music,” as his partner puts it, was no fan of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” But he presumably warmed to the song when it topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, giving Elton his first U.K. Number One, and going on to become one of the year’s biggest selling singles. It’s since become a staple of oldies radio, a smash hit that haters hate to love. Yet its camp is so irresistible, almost everyone does. And Elton’s Euro-disco remake with RuPaul shifts the campiness into warp speed.   

Ziggy Stardust’s brother from another mother, Bennie was another of Elton’s alter-egos. Taupin based the character on Maschinenmensch, the hot robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis; the story — a fanboy pop-song narrative ranking with Eminem’s “Stan” — would be told over a deceptively sludgy, pummeling piano-chorded 4/4. Elton was dead set against releasing it as a single in America (“I fought [the label] tooth and nail: It’s a really odd song, it doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve done, it’s five minutes long,” he recalled). But after black radio DJs in Detroit started playing the cut off the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road LP, there was some reconsideration. It ended up not only as a Number One hit on the Hot 100, but also cracked the top 20 on the soul charts. “It was an unreal thing, seeing my name in among the singles by Eddie Kendricks and Gladys Knight and Barry White,” Elton wrote in his memoir. “I may not have been the first white artist to do that, but I can say with some certainty I was the first from [the London suburb of] Pinner.” Covers have flowed: Biz Markie slurred it with the Beastie Boys; Q-Tip flipped a couplet on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Solid Wall of Sound,” with help from Busta Rhymes and Jack White; Miguel delivered it with a wicked falsetto turn and Wale on the hook. But Mary J. Blige’s “Deep Inside” interpolation rules over all, a version so good Elton jumped on it with her. 

The opening salvo of Caribou might be Elton’s greatest straight-ahead rocker. It’s also effectively his theme song, a proudly self-deprecating blast of braggadocio that winked to his queer fan base from a rock & roll anthem suitable for anyone brave enough to wear the crown. Legend holds that Taupin’s wife Maxine coined the title phrase in response to one of Elton’s pissy moods, and her husband took it to the bank in lyrics further tailored to his pal. It’s a code-switching masterpiece — lines like “eat meat on a Friday, that’s alright” and “I get high in the evening/Sniffing pots of glue” inescapably conjured gay culture (N.B. the glue-y scent of amyl nitrate “poppers”), yet they’d fit a song by the Ramones or the Who just as perfectly. The sound and spirit echoes queer rock predecessors like Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” and Lou Reed’s “Vicious,” and in years to come, Tina Turner and Miley Cyrus would keep the song like an oath. But the original never gets old.

Rivaling “Tiny Dancer” as the most dazzling song on Elton’s first great album, this title track showcases the tasty acoustic-guitar harmonics of Davey Johnstone, who would become Elton’s longtime guitar wingman. Elton mirrors his delicately strummed melody on piano, and the song opens into a cinematic chasm. Paul Buckmaster’s batshit-brilliant string arrangement pulls out all stops, like Gil Evans on a peyote vision quest, and when Elton bellows “water” on the chorus like he’s falling into a well, wrapped in echo, the string section spirals down alongside him. Many thought the song was written about U.S. President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal — incorrect, per Taupin, although the ever-timely lyrics do conjure someone unraveling in the public eye. The album’s musical tour de force, it achieved its full onstage grandeur in 1986, when Elton toured with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. “We miked up every instrument in the orchestra individually, which no one had ever done before,” he recalled in his memoir, “and the effect was astonishing: When the strings came in on ‘Madman Across the Water,’ it took the top of your head off.” Turn up the studio version, and they still do.

The lyrics to this highlight from Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, about escaping an unhealthy relationship by the skin of your teeth, were written about a woman Elton nearly married before his 21st birthday, “a dominating queen” who Taupin depicts “sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair.” (“Bernie didn’t like her at all,” Elton notes helpfully in his memoir — yeah, no kidding.) Another masterful demonstration of how Elton delivers grim imagery (“slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams”) with sweet melodic release, it also signified a coded tale of a queer man refusing to live a lie, the singer’s liberation shining on the coda, falsetto notes capping each repetition of the title. And that title was not hyperbole: Elton had staged a cry for help by sticking his head in an oven with the gas jets on, after which Taupin dragged him to a pub, where Elton was urged by longtime musician friend Long John Baldry to live his truth as a gay man. This six-minute-plus epic reached Number Four on the Hot 100, but its legacy as an anthem of survival and kinship was greater than any chart could measure. It would be a highlight of his legendary 1980 concert in New York’s Central Park, attended no doubt by plenty of fans who understood exactly where Elton was coming from.

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, to quote the title of the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road instrumental that precedes it (see below). 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; in shaping the album’s cinematic themes, he originally had doomed actor Montgomery Clift as the song’s subject, pivoting to Clift’s better-known co-star Marilyn Monroe. A Top 10 hit in both the U.K. and the U.S., it 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 it 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.

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.

“Bernie got the lyrics to ‘Your Song’ over breakfast one morning […] and I wrote the music in 15 minutes flat,” Elton wrote in his memoir about how easily his first carved-in-stone classic came together — adding the caveat that it came so fast because “we’d already done all the hard work.” That work included years of study at the Royal Academy (“much against my will,” he added), years of early gigs with his R&B band Bluesology, and plenty of not-quites with Taupin. The melody here feels breathed, and the recording is tremendously intimate and warmly colloquial — Elton’s “heh,” dropped in just before he pivots with “then again no,” is one of the greatest interjections in 20th-century pop, right up there with Lou Reed’s “ha!” on the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” (Loaded version). “Your Song” became an early calling card. Brian Wilson, who Elton considered “one of pop music’s true geniuses,” greeted the starstruck young singer-songwriter by singing the lyrics to him. (Elton’s panicked internal response was “What the fuck is happening?”) When the biopic Rocketman screened at the Cannes Film Festival, the audience broke into applause at the scene where Elton composes “Your Song.” And a half-century later, the song remains as vital as ever — rocket girl Chappell Roan recorded her own version earlier this year.

Elton’s most heartwrenching ballad, and his most mysterious. Taupin has described it as “the most misinterpreted song that we’d ever written.” But that’s part of its magic. At the height of opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, inspired by a magazine article he’d read about the Tet Offensive, Taupin wanted to write a song that empathized with returning veterans — “The honest grunt in the field” who “had little choice but to go [to serve] when the call came,” Taupin wrote in his memoir, “no loophole escapes, no blind allegiance, just dutifully caught up in the web of the times.” Penned from the point of view of a young man watching his big brother fly off to battle, Taupin admitted in his memoir that, on reflection, the song was “a little confusing lyrically.” As Elton noted, many thought it was “a sort of coded description of a gay relationship.” (“No one noticed any of the songs that Bernie wrote in the Seventies that actually did allude to my sexuality,” he observed wryly. “Everyone jumped on one that had absolutely nothing to do with it.”) But if its unguarded expression of love between men, unspooled over breezy Caribbean melodies, made queer folks feel seen and homophobes uneasy, all the better. “That’s the beauty of songwriting,” Taupin wrote. “Having those listening use their own imagination and draw their own conclusions is half the fun. It’s like abstract art. What do those configurations of color mean to you, what’s it saying? Quite often people’s interpretations of my work have been far more entertaining and ingenious than the original concept.” In any case, the capstone of Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player resonated — the single reached Number Two on the U.S. Hot 100, Number Four on the U.K. charts, eventually being certified platinum, and it’s been widely covered, most recently by indie-rock craftsmen Real Estate. 

No, it’s not about Levon Helm (who Robbie Robertson claimed hated it) — Bernie Taupin just liked the sound of his name. And for the record, “Alvin Tostig” is a fictional character, though The New York Times did publish a column in 1966 discussing the “God is dead” debate. Nevertheless, Elton turned Taupin’s “free-form” lyric writing into an orchestral epic of a dissatisfied rich kid yearning to escape family expectations, with chords and countermelodies rising up amid the “cartoon balloons” Levon’s son spends his days inflating. The song, another highlight of the brilliant Madman Across the Water, charted similarly, climbing slowly after its 1971 release to Number 24 on the Hot 100 in early 1972.

This song, our by-a-nose winner of the argument over the best song on Madman Across the Water, is a head-spinning balancing act of wistful romantic ache, sexiness, country twang, and prog-rock orchestral swagger. A longtime staple of classic-rock radio, it was reborn in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous, the fictionalized account of his years as a precocious teen journalist for this very magazine. To be honest, even (and maybe especially) Rolling Stone vets were prepared to hate the film. But the tour-bus scene when the members of Stillwater and their crew start singing along to “Tiny Dancer,” and Kate Hudson puts her head on Patrick Fugit’s shoulder after telling him, “You are home,” made even cold hearts melt. “That scene turned ‘Tiny Dancer’ into one of my biggest songs overnight,” Elton recalled in his memoir, Me. “People forget that when it came out as a single in 1971, it flopped. It didn’t make the Top 40 in America, and the record label in Britain wouldn’t release it at all.” Maybe it was partly how Taupin’s lyrics, a composite of L.A. women he knew, illuminated the swashbuckling cinematic romance of a musician’s life — “Piano man, he makes his stand/In the auditorium/Looking on, she sings the songs/The words she knows, the tune she hums.” But it was Elton’s supremely hummable tune, and his indelible delivery, that made the moment a universal stand-in for every blissfully irresistible road-trip radio singalong in human history. The scene even triggered a wistfulness in Elton that impacted his music going forward. “I think the film subconsciously put some ideas into my head, about the kind of artist I’d been back then, about how my music was made and how it was perceived,” he’d write, “before I became absolutely huge.”

When Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong strutted across the moon’s surface on live television on July 20, 1969, it captured the imagination of Earth-bound songwriters everywhere. David Bowie gave us Major Tom in “Space Oddity,” maybe his greatest song. And Elton John gave us his greatest song, which came together magically during his woodshedding at the fabled Honky Château. “Bernie would bash out his lyrics and leave them for me on the piano. I’d wake up early, go to the dining room, see what he’d come up with, and write songs while I was having breakfast. The first morning we were there, I had three done by the time the band drifted downstairs looking for something to eat: ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,’ ‘Amy,’ and ‘Rocket Man’…. It felt fantastic, sitting together in the Château’s dining room, hearing a song take shape around us, trying ideas and knowing straight away they were the right ideas.” They sure were. Guitarist Davey Johnstone used a slide to add “odd, lonely notes that drifted around and away from the melody.” The marvelously layered harmonies drifted up with them, an ambivalent heavenly choir shadowing Elton’s be-careful-what-you-wish-for meditations, as the title character is “burning out his fuse up here alone.” It was a timely metaphor that anyone taking one great leap from safe choices would understand, with stoner subtext that landed just as the hangover of the post-hippie era was really kicking in. The song would be covered impressively by artists from Kate Bush to Neil Diamond, Heaven 17 to My Morning Jacket, Little Big Town to Puscifer, William Shatner to Puddle of Mudd — not to mention the Dua Lipa/Elton pandemic phenomena listed above. Sure, “it’s lonely out in space” — but we’re all out here together, and this jam’s universality makes it feel less so.