Rock

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.”

Carlos Santana likes to ascribe metaphors to his music. And in the case of his new album, Sentient, that would be floral arrangements.
“When I go to the lobby in hotels in Europe, they always have these incredible flower arrangements,” the San Francisco Bay Area-based guitar hero tells Billboard. “They hire some people to come in and arrange the flowers in the lobby. That’s how this album was made — that’s how I make all my albums. I feel like a florist who is trying to combine the right colors and textures and create a beautiful ornament. That’s what Sentient is, an ornament of flower arrangements — colors, passions, textures, emotions.”

Variety is certainly the hallmark of the 11-track set, which comes out March 28 and is the follow-up to 2021’s Blessings and Miracles. It includes three previously unreleased tracks, while the rest are remastered songs drawn from various points in Santana’s career, including collaborations with friends living (Smokey Robinson, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and his wife Cindy Blackman Santana) and deceased (Michael Jackson, Miles Davis). The selections might appear random, but Santana promises there’s a unity when they’re brought together.

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“The theme of the story is to bring God out of people,” he explains. “There’s too much fear, there’s too much anger, too much harmony. There’s too much doubt, and the opposite of compassion. I’ve played music since the beginning — and now more than ever — to bring kindness, compassion, generosity, gratitude and divine attributes…elements to take make this world and life more delicious. I trust and believe that God wants something incredible for me to share with people, and that thing is to remind everyone that everyone is worthy of their own divinity and their own light. That’s the message.”

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He adds that featuring collaborations with some of his late friends (“Whatever Happens” from Jackson’s 2001 album Invincible, “Get On” and “Rastafario” with Davis from their collaborations with Italian pianist Paolo Rustichelli for his 1996 album Mystic Man) help illustrate that idea.

“Miles Davis is not here and Michael Jackson’s not here, but they’re in my heart, and it makes me very grateful,” Santana says. “I learned very well from them. I am one of them. It may sound a little this or that, but I’m immortal like them. Like Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, I am here to do the same thing they’re doing, which is to invite people to have a deep sense of self-worth, to look at yourself in the mirror and say ‘I am worth God’s grace. I can create blessings and miracles myself, with my grace.’ That’s the highest thing you do as a musician, to bring God out of people instead of the devil.”

Other tracks include “I’ll Be Waiting” from the Santana band’s Moonflower live album in 1977 and the title track from 1987’s Blues For Salvador, which netted Santana his first Grammy Award, for best rock instrumental performance, the following year. “Please Don’t Take Your Love,” meanwhile, is an earlier take of a track from Robinson’s 2009 album Time Flies When You’re Having Fun, while “Coherence” is a trio track with Blackman Santana and bassist Matt Garrison that’s intended as a preview of the drummer’s own next album.

Santana invokes Jackson again in an unreleased instrumental version of his “Stranger in Moscow,” which Santana recorded with Narada Michael Walden and his band during a club gig in San Rafael, Calif. “We played that on the spot, no rehearsal, and it felt really good,” Santana says. “I had been listening to that particular song for awhile. When I play ‘Stranger in Moscow’ I become Michael Jackson. My fingers become Michael Jackson; I was imagining how he would phrase, how he would sing it, so my guitar became his voice and I learned how to articulate the language, the phrasing. I learned all this from Aretha Franklin, because I play that album, Lady Soul, over and over. I play that album so much I learned the bass, the drums, how to hear her voice.”

After Sentient‘s release Santana will begin a nine-date Oneness Tour beginning April 16 in Highland, Calif., and wrapping May 1 at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. His next residency at the House of Blues Las Vegas runs May 14-25, and a European Oneness Tour leg begins June 9 in Poland and runs through Aug. 11 in Copenhagen.

Santana is working on another performance idea as well — a multi-day, multi-act worldwide festival with the utopian perspective of Woodstock. “With everything that’s happening with this planet, with fear of nuclear war and Korea and China and Russia, the Middle East, I want to create a global concert that goes around the world and (promotes) unity, harmony, oneness,” says Santana, who envisions sites such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, New York’s Central Park and Hyde Park in London. “It’ll keep going in Asia, Japan, Singapore, all the way to Australia and New Zealand and end up with a concert in Honolulu,” he says.

No dates or solid details have yet been determined, but Santana says he’s already reached out to some acts to participate, including Eric Clapton, Metallica, Earth, Wind & Fire and others. “Everybody I talked to, they want to do it,” he says. “It starts and begins with me. This is my vision. This is my aspiration, and I’m not afraid to manifest what I learned from Bill Graham and (Woodstock co-producer) Michael Lang and Clive Davis. I’ve learned from the best, and I believe it’s not impossible to create a global event of this magnitude…and celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. Instead of fear. Celebrate — with joy.”