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How Elton John Rewrote The Rules In Three Astonishing Years
Three years, six albums, and a creative partnership so potent it would never quite be matched again — even by themselves
There are moments in music history when everything aligns — the artist, the collaborators, the cultural moment — and something almost unreasonable happens.
Elton John’s three years between 1970 and 1972 is one of those moments. In the space of just 36 months, he released six albums, conquered two continents, and transformed himself from a slightly awkward unknown with bad glasses into one of the biggest rock stars on the planet. Not gradually. Not incrementally. In one sustained, jaw-dropping sprint.
To understand just how astonishing this run was, it helps to remember where he started. Empty Sky, released in 1969, was the work of a man still searching for himself. There were flickers of promise, hints of what was coming, but it was tentative, exploratory — an apprenticeship album. Not many people bought it, which, in hindsight, was probably a blessing. It gave John room to fail quietly, and then come back swinging.
And swing he did.
The quantum leap
Rarely has any artist taken a more dramatic leap between their first and second albums. Elton John, released in April 1970, landed on the world like an orchestrated thunderclap. Where Empty Sky had been uncertain, this was breathtakingly self-assured. The difference wasn’t just in the songs — it was in the entire architecture of the record.
The key was collaboration. Producer Steve Brown, recognising his own limitations after Empty Sky, had the wisdom and humility to step aside and bring in Gus Dudgeon, fresh from producing David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Dudgeon then brought in arranger Paul Buckmaster, and suddenly the team that would define Elton John’s classic sound was complete.
Buckmaster’s strings weren’t afterthoughts bolted on in post-production — they were recorded live with the band, integral to the process, responding and inspiring in real time. The result was an organic cohesion, a sense of unified purpose, that no amount of studio trickery could have manufactured.
The album announced itself with Sixty Years On — 90 seconds of swirling strings and harp before Elton even opened his mouth, as if the songs themselves demanded reverence. Then Your Song arrived: a single so unassuming and so perfect that it felt less like a pop record and more like a letter slipped under your door. It reached №7 in the UK and №8 in the US. Elton John had a hit on his hands.
Remarkably, the critics largely missed what they were hearing. Most reviews were lukewarm. Almost every one of themhas since recanted. History has been considerably kinder than the initial press: Elton John now sits comfortably in his top five records, the album that didn’t just launch a career but established a blueprint for how sophisticated music could connect with broad audiences without sacrificing emotional directness.
The timing, too, was almost cosmically perfect. The Beatles announced their break-up the very week the album hit shelves. The world was ready for a new rock god. Elton — vulnerable yet confident, theatrical yet grounded — was more than ready to fill the vacancy. The world just hadn’t caught up yet.
The Wild West and the road not taken
Before 1970 was even out, John had released a third album. Tumbleweed Connection arrived in October — and nobody could have predicted it. This wasn’t the natural follow-up to a breakthrough hit record. Instead, John and lyricist Bernie Taupin made a sharp left turn into American roots music, creating something so steeped in Americana that listeners could easily forget these were two young Englishmen who had never set foot in the places they sang about.
Taupin’s obsession with an imagined American landscape — Civil War memories, frontier towns, gospel fires, dusty roads that never truly existed yet felt completely lived in — gave the album its mythic, romantic tone. John used this canvas to deliver some of his most soulful early vocals. Gone were Buckmaster’s sweeping orchestrations. In their place: something grittier, earthier, more rooted in country, blues, and gospel. The album had no singles. None. For a newly minted star who still needed radio to sustain momentum, this was an act of almost reckless artistic courage.
It paid off. Tumbleweed Connection went Top 2 in the UK and Top 5 in the US. Writing in the LA Times, Robert Hillburn called it “that near-perfect album that artists often spend a whole career trying to produce”. It was Elton John’s third record.
The album’s genius lay in how it functioned as a complete work rather than a collection of songs — a concept album in mood and atmosphere rather than plot, creating a sustained feeling of a particular time and place filtered through two British imaginations. Songs like My Father’s Gun — which Bob Dylan singled out for personal admiration — didn’t trivialise the Civil War experience. They inhabited it, painting scenes of loss and misguided hope with genuine reverence. That sincerity was precisely what allowed the album to transcend pastiche.
In the context of John’s eventual superstardom, Tumbleweed Connection stands apart as a road not taken — a glimpse of an alternate career trajectory where artistic vision consistently trumped commercial calculation. It is an album that refuses to pander, demands attention, and rewards patience. And it has aged beautifully, retaining a timeless quality while much of John’s later, more overtly commercial work feels dated by comparison.
The Dark Album
1971 brought Madman Across the Water, and a change of temperature. Where Tumbleweed Connection had been expansive and mythic, Madman turned inward. Themes of isolation, alienation, and emotional instability moved to the foreground. Buckmaster’s strings returned, darker and more haunting than before, lending the record a gothic grandeur that suited the material perfectly.
It opened with a one-two punch that remains one of the most extraordinary back-to-back tracks in rock history. Tiny Dancer — Taupin’s tender, wide-eyed portrait of life on the American road, built around a melody of such luminous simplicity it seems to have always existed — was followed immediately by Levon, a brooding, hypnotic character study that John sells with complete conviction. Neither song charted particularly well at the time. Tiny Dancer barely cracked the US Top 40 and it wasn’t until Cameron Crowe used it in Almost Famous in 2000 that it became the universally loved classic it deserved to be all along.
Madman Across the Water was not without its challenges. John still couldn’t use his own touring band — label executives and producer Dudgeon remained unconvinced — and the album was, by John’s own later admission, squeezed out under pressure. “It was very painful,” he said. “It was done under pressure and really tortured out of us, and I think it’s remarkable that it turned out as well as it did.”
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The second half dips slightly, the ambition occasionally outrunning the execution. But the title track alone — serpentine, minor-key, menacing — stands among the most haunting things he ever recorded. Madman Across the Water wasn’t a massive commercial success, but it closed a chapter. The next one would be something else entirely.
The party starts
In January 1972, John found himself in France. Word had come in about Château d’Hérouville — a large 18th-century country house outside Paris where Van Gogh had painted and Chopin had conducted a mad love affair. It seemed, John decided, like the perfect place to make his fifth album.
Honky Château was the moment everything came together. For the first time, John was free to record with his full band — bassist Dee Murray, drummer Nigel Olsson, and new guitarist Davey Johnstone, who had been quietly brought into the fold during Madman. Free from label pressure and the intrusions of session men, in a rambling French country house with just producer Dudgeon for company, the album was recorded in a single, unhurried month.
The looseness showed — and it was glorious. Honky Château sounded freer, more intimate, more instinctively alive than anything John had previously recorded. Rocket Man — finished on his very first day at the château — sent him spaceward. Honky Cat got the party started. I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself managed the remarkable trick of being simultaneously the most morbid and most joyously rollicking song on the record, a music-hall satire complete with tap-dancing interlude. Then, tucked away on side two, Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters — Taupin’s portrait of New York, written after hearing a gunshot outside his hotel room window — quietly stole the entire album: beautiful, unhurried, tender, and impossible to forget.
Elton John himself said Honky Château did for him what Revolver did for the Beatles — pried open the gilded gates and lifted him onto a higher plane. The record topped the American charts. It was the first of seven consecutive US №1 albums. The streak that followed — Don’t Shoot Me, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Caribou, Captain Fantastic — constitutes one of the great sustained commercial and artistic runs in popular music history. None of it happens without these three foundational years.
What it all meant
Step back from the individual albums for a moment and look at the shape of it. In three years, John had released four records of remarkable consistency — each one different from the last, each one taking a creative risk that lesser artists wouldn’t have dared. A lush orchestral ballad record. A rootsy American concept album with no singles. A dark, inward-facing prog-inflected mood piece. And then a loose, joyous, band record that sent him stratospheric. The range is extraordinary.
And, it’s also worth pointing out he also recorded the soundtrack to 1971’s Friends and put out a live album. So that’s six albums!
What made it possible was the partnership with Taupin — a genuinely unique songwriting collaboration in which two people who rarely occupied the same room at the same time produced some of the most emotionally direct and lyrically ambitious pop music of the era. Taupin would write the words. John would set them to music. The process sounds almost mechanical in description. The results were anything but.
By the end of 1972, Elton John was a superstar. The slightly awkward young man with bad glasses and acne on the cover of his second album — the last photograph of a pre-fame life — was gone. In his place stood one of the defining artists of the decade that was just getting started.
He was 25 years old. And he was only just beginning.
Question without notice
Were 1970–72 actually Elton’s greatest years? The case for 1972–74 is formidable: Don’t Shoot Me delivered his first US №1 single; Goodbye Yellow Brick Road — 17 songs written in two and a half weeks — contained Candle in the Wind, Bennie and the Jets, and what might be the best song he ever sang in the title track. Even the relatively rushed Caribou went to №1 on both sides of the Atlantic.
Then there is 1973–75, bookended by Captain Fantastic and Rock of the Westies — two albums that achieved the then-unprecedented feat of entering the US charts at №1. The commercial dominance was almost incomprehensible.
But the 1970–72 period has something the others don’t: it was formative. These were albums made before superstardom gave him permission to do anything he liked — records of genuine artistic courage with no commercial safety net. There is a hunger in them that the later work, brilliant as it often is, cannot replicate.
The later peaks were higher. But this was where Elton John learned to climb.
- Tumbleweed Connection was released on this day in 1970.
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