Elton John Song Quotes

I got really bored, so I decided to pick a theme song! Something appropriate. And naturally, it should be something from Lewis’s godawful seventies collection. It wouldn’t be right any other way. There are plenty of great candidates: “Life on Mars?” by David Bowie, “Rocket Man” by Elton John, “Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan. But I settled on “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees.

Candle In the Wind Author: Bernie Tauplin Goodbye Norma Jeane. Though I never knew you at all. You had the grace to hold yourself While those around you crawled. And they crawled out of the woodwork, And they whispered into your brain, They set you on the treadmill And they made you change your name. And it seems to me you lived your life Like a candle in the wind, Never knowing who to cling to When the rain set in. And I would have liked to have known you But I was just a kid, Your candle burned out long before Your legend ever did. Loneliness was tough. The toughest role you ever played. Hollywood created a superstar And pain was the price you paid. Even when you died The press still hounded you- All the paper had to say Was that Marilyn was found in the nude. Goodbye Norma Jeane. Though I never knew you at all. You had the grace to hold yourself While those around you crawled. Goodbye Norma Jeane. From the young man in the 22nd row Who sees you as something more than sexual, More than just our Marilyn Monroe.

The only real problem came with a track called ‘The Last Song’. Bernie’s lyrics were about a man dying of AIDS being reconciled with his estranged father, who had excommunicated him when he found out he was gay. They were beautiful, but I just couldn’t cope with singing them. It was just after Freddie’s death. Somewhere in Virginia, I knew Vance Buck was dying, too. Every time I tried to get the vocal down, I started crying. Eventually I managed it and ‘The Last Song’ was subsequently used as the finale of And the Band Played On, a docudrama about the discovery of, and the fight against, HIV.

One song, ‘All The Nasties’, was about me, wondering aloud what would happen if I came out publicly: ‘If it came to pass that they should ask – what would I tell them? Would they criticize behind my back? Maybe I should let them’. Not a single person seemed to notice what I was singing about.

Or at least, he thought they were specially made, until we played a gig and he saw someone wearing exactly the same kaftan as him. He stopped in the middle of a song and started shouting angrily at him – ‘Where did you get that shirt? That’s my shirt!’ This, I felt, rather ran contrary to the kaftan’s associations with peace and love

after a long but ultimately fruitful search to find the most boring song in my catalogue. He managed to unearth something completely nondescript that Bernie hadn’t even written the lyrics for, one that we’d earmarked for sale to a middle-of-the-road crooner.

One Sunday at Woodside, gloomy and hungover, 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 had died in a motorbike crash at virtually the same time I was writing the song, so I called it ‘Song For Guy’. It was like nothing I’d ever done before, and my American record label refused to release it as a single – I was furious – but it became a colossal hit in Europe.

And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot. Admittedly, I thought it was a pretty good song about a warthog who farted a lot: at the risk of appearing big-headed, I’m pretty sure that in a list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine would come in somewhere near the top.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

The Elton John song "Tiny Dancer" is secret communist propaganda. It has the lyrics: "lay me down in sheets of Lenin

Sitting in the dentist high chair and ,"Your Song" plays, by Sir Elton John. Tears flowing like a river.

No one thought it odd that at her funeral Elton John should perform a reworking of the song he had originally composed as hero-worship to Marilyn Monroe, for she too was an icon for a secular age and in the end icons of that kind are interchangeable.

Supernovas gave birth to new worlds hammered out of ice, only to succumb trillions of years later into balls of fiery gas; kingdoms rose and crumbled away; the melody to “Your Song” from the ancient Elton John vinyl her father loved to play spun through her head. And then she remembered she was supposed to answer.

John didn’t score his first Number One hit until 1974, the fourth Beatle to reach this milestone (Ringo beat him twice), but he got over with “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” with a big assist from Elton John. It’s not a famous song anymore, for the understandable reason that the final line is “Don’t need a gun to blow your mind.” After December 1980, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” dropped off the radio and hasn’t been heard since. But the most shocking thing isn’t the gun line—it’s the lush pop feel. The song it really resembles is the Wings hit “Listen to What the Man Said,” with the same yacht-rock studio sheen. Both serve love-is-the-answer platitudes, though attractively warmhearted ones: “Whatever gets you to the light, ’sall right” vs. “I don’t know but I think love is fine.” Both hit Number One, for just one week. John’s sax solo is Bobby Keys, Paul’s is Tom Scott, though they could have traded places without anyone noticing. Yet I loved both songs as a boy, and still do—Elton, always the kindliest-sounding of rock megastars, sings on John’s hit, and sounds like the guiding spirit of Paul’s, as if he’s a yenta nudging them together.