Music

There were times during the October 2023 making of their new album, Who Believes in Angels, out Friday (April 4) that Elton John wasn’t sure that he and his good friend Brandi Carlile could carry on.

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For example, as tensions in parts of the Middle East exploded following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, John felt creating music was futile.    

“Brandi was staying next door to my house, and she came around for breakfast and the newspapers were on the table,” John recalls over Zoom. “It was Gaza, the hostages, and I was in such a bad kind of funk — I just said, ‘I don’t know how we can write an album at this time when there’s so much crap going on in the world.’”

Carlile listened and then literally took their conversation and wrote “A Little Light” with such lyrics as “With the papers on your plate/ I see the sorrow in the headlines/ And the worry on your face.” The song goes on to acknowledge the difficult times, but to also find ways to “sing into the darkness.” The pair recorded the song later that day. While the album’s 10 songs don’t directly reference current events, “hopefully it’s an album that’s really ripe for these times. I really believe it is,” John says.

There were also internal challenges. John had come off his final world tour and was exhausted from the multi-year trek, at times throwing temper tantrums in the studio as the frustration to create something vibrant and new. “Nobody wants another Elton John album like the other 35 [I’ve made],” he says. “This one had to have energy, and it had to have a statement saying, ‘Listen, I’m nearly 78 and I’m gonna be really sounding powerful,’ and that’s what I wanted.

That’s why in addition to working with his longtime partner/lyricist Bernie Taupin, he brought in Carlile, “because she was capable of pushing me,” John says. “I’m capable of pushing her. And then in the middle, you’ve got Andrew Watt, who was the most excitable, incredible producer. The start of the album was difficult. I was not well, I was tired. I wasn’t in a good mood. And for the first three or four days, it was touch and go whether the album would happen.” (For the first time, John allowed cameras to capture the recording process for a forthcoming documentary.)

The turning point was creating the nearly seven-minute album opener “The Rose of Laura Nyro,” which begins with an extended majestic, driving instrumental intro before bursting into John and Carlile’s vocals intwining in tribute to the legendary songwriter.

“Bernie gave the lyric to me. We’ve both been huge Laura Nyro fans all our life. We remember lying on the floor in my parents’ apartment and listening to [Nyro’s 1968 classic] Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. She was such a great writer, and she changed tempos. I felt possessed by her when I wrote that melody,” John says. “Brandi rang me that evening from the car, as she was leaving the studio, and said, ‘You won’t believe it, but it was her birthday.’” Nyro, who died in 1997, received a writer’s credit on the song along with John, Taupin, Carlile and Watt.

From that point on, the creative process was like an express train, John says. Despite—or perhaps because of the elevated self-imposed pressure—John’s playing and vocals sound vigorous and spirited throughout the set. “You should have seen it. It was it just pours out of him,” Carlile says. “You can’t believe it when you’re witnessing it. I’ve known him for 17 years, but I never saw him like that.”

Both Taupin and Carlile delivered lyrics to John, who would set the words to melody, as he has for decades with Taupin. 

Their styles are similar enough that John says it felt no different whether he was writing to Taupin’s or Carlile’s lyrics. “Not at all,” he says. That’s in part because Carlile has absorbed Taupin and John’s songs since she was 11 and Taupin is one of her biggest influences. “I really realized it on this project just how natural that is for me,” says Carlile. “The way Bernie behaved toward me during this process was incredibly inspiring. You can really tell that he’s raised daughters. He was just so kind to me, even though I was helping to do his job,” she says. “He would take me for dinner, and we’d get steaks and drink whiskey sours. We would talk about Elton and then he would give me a lyric and trust me with it.”

With Watt and Taupin, the pair wrote and recorded the album at Los Angeles’ Sunset Sound Studios over a three-week period, joined by a core band composed of Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Pino Palladino (Nine Inch Nails, Gary Numan and David Gilmour) and Josh Klinghoffer (Pearl Jam, Beck).

Carlile goes toe to toe with John in showing off a harder musical edge on the album, propelled by a Sunburst Les Paul electric guitar John gifted her a few years ago after she had sent John another ballad and he wanted to give her incentive to rock out.

 “I know she can write those beautiful Americana songs like she’s done on all her albums,” John says. “I love those things, but I wanted to push her to say, ‘Hey, you’re capable of doing so much more and varying stuff, because there’s nothing you cannot do.’”

Carlile first played the guitar at a show at famed outdoor amphitheater The Gorge in Quincy, Washington, near where she lives. “Then I started writing songs on it and it really did change the trajectory of my songwriting,” she says.

The album’s rock feel is especially evident on second track, “Little Richard’s Bible,” a bluesy, rollicking, piano-pounding up-tempo tune with lyrics from Taupin about Little Richard, another major influence on John, that is followed by the life-affirming “Swing for the Fences,” which features a belting lead vocal by Carlile and a video that depicts a beautiful gay love story.

“Laura Nero was a gay icon, Little Richard was a gay icon — and then we got ‘Swing for the Fences,’ which is about gay people,” John says. “So the first three tracks on this album are really about stating who we are. How great we’re celebrating the people who paved the way for us!”

The openly gay John, 78, and Carlile, 43, can’t help but wonder how different their childhoods may have been if they had had a song and video like “Swing for the Fences” to guide them and make them feel less alone when they were younger.

“It would have been unbelievable to have that. Unimaginable probably for Elton,” Carlile says. “I remember the first gay kiss I ever saw on television was in the ‘90s on the Roseanne show. Her sister Jackie. And I remember there were all these warnings on Channel Five: ‘You couldn’t have this on TV.’ And I was like, think about if I had had a video like ‘Swing for the Fences’ and how for life affirming that would have been.”

The album closes with the elegiac “When This Old World Is Done With Me,” a moving piece about death sung by John. John broke down in the studio when he realized what the song was about. “It sort of crept up on me. I was writing the verse, and I think, ‘This is pretty,’ then I got to the chorus, and I realized what it was,” he says. “When you get to certain age, you think about mortality because I have children, I have [husband] David [Furnish], and I was so happy with that song. I did it all in one take, voice and piano, and it came off really well. I don’t want it to be the last song people hear about me. I’ve got more songs in me than that.”

In fact, John says he hopes this album is “the start of something,” and the pair continuing to record together, but adds there are no plans — and further states that Carlile should do her own album next, “because we don’t want to become Steve and Eydie,” he says, jokingly referring to ‘60s pop duo/married couple Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.

John has a bigger goal for his friend that he hopes this album will help accomplish. “My ambition for her with this album was to break her internationally. She’s a well-known artist in America, but in the rest of the world, she has a lot of work to do,” he says. “She came to England last year. She played Hyde Park with Stevie Nicks. She blew people away. She did the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, got five-star reviews everywhere. And so, this album hopefully will open all those doors that she deserves to walk through and become the international artist that she should be.”

Carlile sighs appreciatively upon hearing John’s declaration, and says she knew “on some level” that was John’s plan. She’s writing a solo album now, and confesses she feels “chordically anemic” without him there to assist with the music. But almost a year and a half after finishing the album and working with John and Taupin, she is still on a high.

“I don’t think it’ll ever really catch up to how incredibly life affirming this has been for me,” she says. “I’m gonna have to really think about it for the next 10 years.”