Spring may have sprung, but there’s little in life to truly raise the sprits, so this week’s release of Who Believes in Angels? the much-anticipated album from Elton John and Brandi Carlile is especially welcome.
The album cover alone is rather magnificent, all dazzling Seventies retro that references Tina Turner and Village People and, more specifically, Amy Winehouse and Little Richard, the latter celebrated in the second cut, “Little Richard’s Bible”, Bernie Taupin’s lyric being the breakthrough moment in sessions that “appeared to be lurching towards disaster”.
The idea for the album came from Elton, proposed to Carlile over lunch at his LA home following the conclusion of the American leg of his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road tour. For Brandi – with whom he had occasionally partnered and who played a heartfelt tribute to the piano man at last year’s Library of Congress Gershwin Prize – it was a dream come true. By the time the coffee arrived, it was all agreed – Andrew Watts would produce, and Bernie Taupin would write the words for what would be “a genuine collaboration, with Elton-led songs and Brandi-led songs, Brandi writing lyrics and Bernie changing them and me kind of acting as referee”. The going, initially at least, wasn’t too smooth: Elton was exhausted and irritable, and we now know that coming off the back of an already tricky few years came a serious eye problem, which has (for the moment) rendered him effectively blind.
Whatever Sturm und Drang took place inside LA’s Sunset Sound studio, it was all worthwhile. The Elton John songs that are (for me, at least) always the most effective and affective, are the piano ballads which are in shorter supply here – we’ll come back to the closing number in a moment – but this is a big, powerful and invigorating album that is more than the sum of its two parts. Here, you feel, are two perfectly matched musicians, their voices blending seamlessly, their piano and guitar riffing off each other. There are moments of rock bombast, but also moments of great musical delicacy, “You Without Me”, for example. The vocal harmonies on “Someone to Belong To” are pitch-perfect.
The opening track, “The Rose of Laura Nyro”, is an hommage to the singer-songwriter who died too young and of whom John has said: “I idolised her. The soul, the passion, the out-and-out audacity… like nothing I’d ever heard before.” The intro (think “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding”), which starts quietly and delicately, builds and builds, a powerful guitar solo heralding the final entry of Elton and Brandi singing a lyric replete with Nyro and New York references.
“When This Old World is Done with Me” is a stop-you-in-your-tracks piece of brilliance, Elton, looking through severely blunted sight at his approaching 80-year milestone, and setting Taupin’s beautiful lyric with melodic and harmonic brilliance that at times recalls “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”. It could me a schmaltzy close but it’s far from it, and the simple combination of voice and piano is rather breathtaking. Let’s hope Elton isn’t “returned to the tide” any time soon but when the velvet curtain does eventually close on his extraordinary life this song is as good a reminder as any of John’s songwriting at its best. When the fuss, feathers and fandango are cast aside, we see Sir Elton for what he truly is.
Meanwhile, he has mused, let’s hope seriously, that “this (album) is the start of my career, Mark 2.”
