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Thu 17 September 2026 8:17, UK
A single song, or even an album, can’t define a career that has stretched more than 50 years, like the one Elton John has enjoyed. However, one piece of music is enough to put the building blocks in place to ensure that it’s possible.
The music industry has always been a cut-throat business, with labels ready to play with the next shiny toy and throw the baby out with the bathwater if they aren’t making them money. It’s not necessarily about the talent on show, but a return on their investment, like any other traditional business.
Rightly or wrongly, to exist in that eco-chamber, especially during the 1970s, artists need to repay the faith shown in them by producing hit records. For a time, it seemed like this might never be the case for Elton, despite the gold that waited for him on the yellow brick road.
In his mind, John never believed it was his destiny to have the career that followed, explaining on the Smartless podcast in 2024, “I was a kid in a candy store, I never really visualised Elton John being a big star. It all happened by accident.”
His rise to superstardom was a whirlwind, and felt, from his perspective, like in the blink of an eye that he’d gone from living a normal life to being unable to leave the house without being swarmed.
Elton’s debut album, Empty Sky, didn’t catch fire with the general public upon its release in 1969. His label didn’t expect his next record to be a commercial success, nor did John. Instead, the plan was to release the collection of songs with the hope of luring other artists to cover the tracks, and one of them would become a hit.
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This strategy proved to be a masterstroke. Shortly after the album’s release, ‘Your Song’ was picked up by Three Dog Night. However, they didn’t release it as a single, which gave John’s version the necessary space to become an international hit single.
Nine months after the release of the eponymous Elton John, ‘Your Song’ rose to eighth in the United States and seventh in Elton’s home country. It was a greater success than he ever deemed possible, and for him, it’s all down to the power of the songwriting.
Despite the wisdom expressed in the lyrics, Bernie Taupin was only 19 when he penned the words for ‘Your Song’. It’s easy to forget that Elton was only three years older and essentially still a boy, too, when he recorded it. While many artists can no longer convincingly sing the creations they made at this age, he’s instead grown into ‘Your Song’ and loves it more than ever.
In 2013, Elton told Rolling Stone: “What can I say, it’s a perfect song. It gets better every time I sing it. I remember writing it at my parents’ apartment in North London, and Bernie giving me the lyrics, sitting down at the piano and looking at it and going, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a great lyric, I can’t fuck this one up’.”
Reflecting on the creative process and highlighting how it was the turning point of his career, John added, “It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in, and we both knew. I was 22, and he was 19, and it gave us so much confidence.
Empty Sky was lovely, but it was very naive. We went on to do more esoteric stuff like ‘Take Me to the Pilot,’ of course, but musically, this was a big step forward. And the older I get, the more I sing these lyrics, and the more they resonate with me.”
Taupin feels equally positive about the dreamy ‘Your Song’ and just like John, his memory of writing it is crystal clear, once saying, “This one is the one I recall like it was yesterday. The rest of them I’m a little shaky on.”
If ‘Your Song’ had been a hit for Three Dog Night instead of John, there’s a strong chance that John would never have become ‘The Rocketman‘, and always have just been a songwriter to the stars. Admittedly, he would have taken this at age 22, but along with Taupin, the duo had much more to give the world than that.
Within one hit record, John had been put on people’s radar, and he was going to let hell freeze over before letting that position slip. For that reason alone, ‘Your Song’ is a composition that he’ll never tire of singing.
