Elton John, courtesy of Gregg Kemp.
My mother, knowing me as well as her, was surprised to learn that I like Elton John’s recent song with Dua Lipa because it’s new and I generally don’t like the new music. Ironically, although she is my mother, she loves new music and listens to new music radio stations, so she informed me that this made Elton John the first artist to have a song on the charts in six decades. .
“You should revisit one of his songs from each decade,” she suggested. And that’s all I needed to hear because I’m on year 5 of this column and there are only so many ideas.
So here’s an Elton John song from the Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 each for each of the six decades he had one, and songs that marked the decades he didn’t crack the Top 10. Turns out the guy is really, really good.
1970s: “Rocket Man”
The 70s were by far the most prolific decade for Elton in the Top 10, which means it should have been the toughest call. Especially since the choices were: “Your Song”, “Rocket Man”, “Honky Cat”, “Crocodile Rock”, “Daniel”, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “Bennie and the Jets”, “Don’ t Let the Sun Go Down On Me”, “The Bitch is Back”, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, “Philadelphia Freedom”, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”, “Island Girl”, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”, “Sorry seems to be the most difficult word” and “Mom can’t buy you love”.
Seriously, check out this list! If anyone had released even one of these songs, they would continue to live off the county fair circuit. It’s been a legitimately amazing race for only 10 years.
That said, “Rocket Man” is one of my all-time favorites. I’m a sucker for ’70s songs about astronauts (I’m looking at you, “Space Oddity”) and this is one of the few works in any medium that truly humanizes the profession. If you think of astronauts as regular people with cool jobs, you find cool stuff like Leland Melvin’s dogs, Chris Hadfield’s crime novel, or American hero Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist right in the face. I could watch this shot a million times.
Oh, and it’s a beautiful heartfelt song. Truly belongs on the list of greats.
1980s: “Sad Songs (Say So Much)”
This one is driving me crazy. We’ll come to that in a second.
Elton’s Top 10 Hits of the 80s are “Little Jeannie”, “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues”, “Sad Songs (Say So Much)”, “That’s What Friends Are For”, “Nikita”, “Candle in the wind” and “I don’t want to go on with you like this.” Not as strong as the 70s list, but not bad! There are a lot of classics on it.
What drives me crazy about the 80s is that my favorite Elton John song from that decade is “I’m Still Standing”, which never made it past number 12! How is it not a Top 10 song? ! To hell with the whole decade of the 80s. The only good thing to come out of that decade was me.
Either way, “Sad Songs” isn’t a bad second choice. It has that unidentifiable 80s quality that really puts it in a certain place and at a certain time, but it’s still a great song. Maybe one day someone will adequately explain to me what is happening in the video.
1990s: “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”
It was hard. It’s a shorter list but with a functional link: “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”, and “Candle in the Wind 1997”.
On one side you have Princess Diana’s remake of “Candle in the Wind.” It’s a moving tribute to her close friend and truly captured the feelings of many after her tragic death. Even compared to the Marilyn-Monroe inspired original, it is deeper and more moving in both lyrical content and performance. That said, it’s a remake of an existing song, and it’s a bit of a burn on Marilyn Monroe.
Then there’s the first single from “The Lion King” soundtrack. The entire album is a classic even by the standards of Disney movies or an artist who had had 26 top 10 hits in the 30 years to that point. I absolutely love that movie when I was a kid, and the songs were a big reason for that. It even led to my love of Shakespeare when I found out it was a loose remake of “Hamlet”, with a few more singing warthogs. (I have my theories on Polonius but he has no song in the First Folio version.)
In the end, it is a song written for children and a song written for adults. I was a kid in 1994, so my nostalgia rests squarely on the first one. If you disagree, pretend like I went the other way and I won’t argue.
2000s: “I want love”
It’s the first decade since the ’60s that Elton John hasn’t had a Top 10 song on the Billboard Hot 100, which is staggering. He had three songs on the Adult Contemporary chart: “Someday Out of the Blue”, “I Want Love”, and “Answer in the Sky”.
It’s something that happens to all solo artists that have been around for quite a long time. It reaches a point where the music starts to sound like what you hear in a dentist’s office. The songs are still good – don’t get me wrong – they just aren’t good in a way that makes them stick with you after you hear them let alone want to hear them again later.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know any of this. I’ve listened to them all and they’re all…well. I picked this one because Young Iron Man is in the video and does it in one take.
2010s: “(I’m) going to love myself again”
I didn’t really have a choice: the only Top 10 single on any US chart was this song, written for the end credits of Elton John’s musical biopic, “Rocketman.” He played with the guy from “Kingsmen”, who played him in the movie.
It’s pretty good! I don’t have much to say about it, but it’s good. It’s a throwback to his 70s stuff, which would provide a great bookend to the column if I was writing this in 2019. Man, that would have been a great way to wrap up a column. But there’s another decade to go…
2020s: “Cold Heart”
Instead, we have “Cold Heart”, which has probably been my favorite song since the 80s. His voice is still absolutely distinctive and immediately identifiable, but otherwise it sounds nothing like an Elton John song from another era.
And thanks to him for that. The man is 74, he’s been releasing songs since 1968 and he has a song that peaked at No. 7 on the Hot 100 and sounds so fresh and contemporary it didn’t even cross my radar. It’s incredible! It’s so easy to be so successful that you stick with it, and here it is going out of its way and succeeding. May we all be as flexible and open to change in our 70s.
Follow editor Daniel J. Willis and tweet him column ideas at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.
