Rock

Longtime friends Elton John and Brandi Carlile have joined together for Who Believes in Angels?, a new studio album the pair recorded over 20 days starting in October 2023. Interscope will release the set on April 4, but the title track was released on Wednesday (Feb. 5).

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The pair wrote and created the album with John’s long-time co-writer Bernie Taupin and producer Andrew Watt. The quartet are nominated for an Oscar for best original song for “Never Too Late,” the end-title track to John’s documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late, which is included on the album.

“As my Farewell tour came to an end, I knew I wanted to make a new album with Brandi, I wanted to shift gears and do something different from anything I’d done before,” John tells Billboard. “I have always found Brandi so inspiring, our friendship was so close, and I just had the instinct that we could produce something really amazing. Creating Who Believes in Angels? was challenging, and I had a lot of self-doubt, but alongside Bernie Taupin and Andrew Watt, we ended up writing 10 songs in 20 days and it was one of the most joyous and exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”

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Billboard has an exclusive look at the emotional, candid trailer that captures the recording of the album and the vulnerabilities and frustrations that gripped John as the quartet worked at Los Angeles’ Sunset Sound Studios.

“I’m 76 and I want to do something different. I don’t want to coast,” John says. But the recording sessions proved difficult, given that John was exhausted from finishing his final world tour. “I was a nightmare. Angry, I was tired, I was irritable,” John says, as he throws his earphones down in frustration and Watt snaps at him for being so “impatient.”  

“Elton is prone to moments of insecurity, especially when the stakes are high,” says Carlile, who has “idolized” John since she was 11. She admits to “having a hard time connecting to Elton” at times during the process and wondering why he wants to make the album given that is it radically different from how he has created before.

Throughout the trailer, the tension escalates, as John gets so frustrated, he tears up a lyric sheet and throws it on the floor, declaring, “I’m going home,” and Watt directs the crew to cut the mics.

But then John realizes that Carlile, Taupin and Watt are depending upon him and suddenly the process gels and the creativity begins flowing again. “We’ve made an album that I think is spectacular for all the ages,” Carlile says. “My life has been taking me to this album the whole time.”  They are joined in the studio by Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chat Smith, renowned session bassist Pino Palladino and Pearl Jam guitarist Josh Klinghoffer on the album that spans rock, pop and Americana.

As the trailer wraps, John begins crying, but this time it’s happy tears.

“Who Believes In Angels? feels like going into another era and I’m pushing the door open to come into the future,” John said in a statement. “I have everything I’ve done behind me and it’s been brilliant, amazing. But this is the new start for me. As far as I’m concerned, this is the start of my career Mark 2.”

“I’m still reeling from the fact that I got to do it,” added Carlile. “I think all ships rise with Elton John’s standards for songwriting, and it was an incredibly challenging and inspiring environment to work in, everybody throwing in ideas, everybody listening to everybody else’s ideas. It felt like a family. The world is a wild place to live in right now. It’s hard to find peace and triumph. It’s a radical act to seek out joyful and euphoric happenings. And that is what this album represents to me.”

Other than Taupin, John has seldom worked with collaborators: he and his musical hero the late Leon Russell made two albums together with T Bone Burnett and he has collaborated with lyricists like Tim Rice for musicals, including The Lion King and Aida.

Fans who pre-order Who Believes In Angels? are eligible for a chance to buy tickets to An Evening with Elton John & Brandi Carlile at the London Palladium on March 26.

Who Believes In Angels? tracklisting:

The Rose Of Laura Nyro

Little Richard’s Bible

Swing For The Fences

Never Too Late

You Without Me

Who Believes In Angels?

The River Man

A Little Light

Someone To Belong To

When This Old World Is Done With Me

A day after performing an all-star version of Randy Newman’s 1983 pop classic “I Love L.A.” to open Sunday’s (Feb. 2) 67th annual Grammy Awards, Dawes announced that they are releasing their version to help with Los Angeles wildfire relief. The proceeds from sales of the song will go to the Recording Academy and MusiCares’ […]

You could tell the story of Marianne Faithfull, who died Jan. 30 at the age of 78, in three recordings — specifically three versions of “As Tears Go By.” The British singer initially recorded the song, one of the first that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote together, in 1964 as a 17-year-old ingénue. Produced by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who discovered her at a party, the recording is a brisk, breezy slice of chamber-pop and Faithfull’s vocals are all breathy sweep. Faithfull wrote in her 1994 autobiography that Oldham immediately knew it would be a hit, and it reached No. 9 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Faithfull returned to the song twice more in the studio: First on Strange Weather, the 1987 album she recorded after struggling with drug addiction for much of the ’70s and ’80s, and then again on the 2018 Negative Capability. Especially in this last version, recorded when she was 71, you can hear both how far she travelled and the toll that hard road took on her. Faithfull was, above all, a survivor — of tabloid coverage of a drug bust where she was found wearing only a fur rug, of a heroin addiction that cost her custody of her son, of years living on the street — but she was never made it look easy. Indeed, her genius was to make it sound as hard as it must have been.

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Faithfull, who dated Jagger for years in the late 1960s, began her career as a living symbol of Swinging London, an especially beautiful woman in a scene of beautiful people. She had a glamorous background to match: Her father was a British intelligence officer and her mother was the daughter of an Austrian aristocrat. (She was related to the Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold van Sacher-Masoch, for whom masochism is named, which would have been a great opening line if Faithfull ever needed one.) She was better educated than Jagger, and she introduced him to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which inspired the song “Sympathy for the Devil.”

It’s hard to hear that kind of depth on Faithfull’s first recording, “As Tears Go By,” which came out more than a year before the Stones version. Even by 1964 standards, the song sounds remarkably innocent — it’s pop, without a rock sensibility. In her 1994 autobiography, Faithfull describes it a bit disparagingly as “the Europop you might hear on a French jukebox.” The lyrics are downcast — it’s the evening of the day, she’s watching the children play — but her voice sounds too high and pure to give them much feeling.

The following April, in 1965, Faithfull released two albums the same day — a self-titled pop album and the folk-oriented Come My Way. (The latter album didn’t come out in the U.S.) Within a year, she separated from her husband, John Dunbar, and started dating Jagger. (“I slept with three” Rolling Stones, she said later, “and then I decided the lead singer was the best bet.”) The year after that, she was busted at Richards’ estate with Jagger, Richards and others, wearing only a rug and, she writes in her biography, coming down from an acid trip.

After Faithfull broke up with Jagger, in 1970, her life unraveled — she lost custody of her son, attempted suicide, became addicted to heroin and ended up living on the street in London. She tried to return to singing, with a couple of false starts, including recordings from 1971 that eventually came out as Rich Kid Blues and the 1975 and 1976 country tracks released as Dreamin’ My Dreams and then as Faithless. Finally, in 1979, she recorded her masterpiece, Broken English, a mix of off-kilter dance music and rough New Wave with a punk edge. By then, her voice had worn ragged — lower in pitch, rougher in tone, better suited for more sophisticated songs.

Faithfull recorded two more albums before getting clean in the mid-’80s and, on the 1987 album Strange Weather, finding a deep, world-weary voice that stayed with her for the rest of her career. A dark cabaret sensibility ties together the album, which is all covers, from “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to “Hello Stranger.” She also revisited “As Tears Go By,” which was released as a single but didn’t chart, in a slower, sadder version. On this version, her voice is deeper, the orchestration darker and sparser. Faithfull now sounds like she’s watching the children play from the distance the lyrics imply, looking at their innocence with hers behind her. She could be looking back on herself singing in 1964 (“Doing things I used to do/ They think are new”). It’s an astonishing reinvention of her earlier hit.

Faithfull spent the rest of her career bringing her deep, weathered voice to various kinds of music — standards by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, compositions by writers of her generation, and songs written for her by younger musicians who admired her (including Beck and Jarvis Cocker on Kissin Time and Nick Cave and PJ Harvey on Before the Poison). Finally, on Negative Capability, she revisits a few songs she had already recorded — “A Tears Go By,” as well as Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (which she had recorded on Rich Kid Blues) and “Witches’ Song” (on Broken English). All three sound slower, almost strained at times, as though they are harder to for Faithfull to sing than they once were. She turns “Witches’ Song,” powerful and incantatory on Broken English, into a dirge, as though she recognized she was no longer the witch she once was. But the most striking difference is in “As Tears Go By.”

Faithfull’s 2018 take on “As Tears Go By” is a lifetime away from her 1964 hit — literally. Her voice, long since worn, now sounds downright weary — as though she’s singing only with great effort. The production, lush in 1964 and sparse in 1987, is minimal but warm, transparent enough to reveal every tremor in her voice. The song, originally light and airy, now sounds almost funereal, as Faithfull’s voice comes close to cracking. It sounds as though she’s revealing more than she intends to — “It is the evening of the day” has a very different meaning at 71 than it does at 17. The children in the song, once so close, are now only visible from a distance. The 17-year-old ingénue is obscured by a lifetime of hard-won accomplishment and regret. This last version of the song is a harder listen, especially for anyone who has heard the other two, and it wasn’t a single, much less a hit. On it, though, Faithfull took ownership of the song, and her history with it, and with it her remarkable legacy.