There is a line from an old Bob Dylan song that goes “Time will tell just who has fell and who’s been left behind.”
Certainly that’s true of any newly-released album by a veteran artist. The tendency is always there, at least among music journalists and critics, to measure such new albums against what has come before.
There is a desire to weigh them against a musician’s legacy that may well have grown larger than life, and to view them through the rose-colored glasses of long and loving hindsight, only to end up feeling less than satisfied.
Partly because of this, we have rock ‘n’ roll stars well into middle age and beyond, abandoning all attempts at innovation in the spirit of going back to their roots, of standing again in the insurgent shadows of their youth, when the music hit harder and fans screamed louder.
The only desire for a musician like that is to figure out what made them successful in the first place, and try to repeat it, to make an album like they used to. Elton John’s latest CD, Songs from the West Coast, attempts to be such an album.
Discarding the electronic wizardry of the modern recording process, the piano is the dominant instrument on every track here. With no drum machines, a minimum of synthesizers, and an emphasis on sparse rock instrumentation, this album takes a lot of the spotlight off Elton’s lavish lifestyle, his excesses and his media image, refocusing it where it rightfully needs to be: on Elton and Bernie’s amazing songs.
The awkwardly-titled “American Triangle” will probably get special attention because it is styled as a tribute to Matthew Wayne Shepard, a gay student from Wyoming who was beaten to death.
But that’s as far as any ideology is taken on the CD. The rest of the songs deal with life, love and relationships, with a tendency to veer towards the darker side of things.
Don’t expect an upbeat CD with song titles like “Dark Diamond,” “Original Sin” and “The Wasteland.”
Elsewhere, musically, there is a noticeable Beatles influence. The whining guitar solo in “I Want Love” could have come straight from the hands of George Harrison himself, and the drums are instantly comparable to the same steady, rhythmic thud that Ringo is famous for.
Former Madonna producer Patrick Leonard co-produced the CD with Elton, and though the songwriters were attempting to step back in time to their former glory days, the songs are still surprisingly modern in their sound, subject and feel.
Thomas Wolfe once wrote that we can’t ever go home again. The songwriting team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin has made quite a few twists and turns together, but one gets the impression after listening to Songs from the West Coast that, as artists anyway, they have finally made it back home.
Grade: A-
