Elton John was 66 years outdated when he described The Diving Board as “my most adult album.” Launched on September 13, 2013, it marked a return to the stripped-down, piano-and-vocal type that made him a star within the first place.
Producer T Bone Burnett was central to that simplification, invited by Elton to supervise the album following his sympathetic remedy of The Union, the star’s 2010 collaboration with hero and mentor Leon Russell. However in distinction to the prodigious fertility of the singer-songwriter’s earlier years, this time Elton’s followers had some ready to do. The Diving Board was his first all-new solo studio work since 2006’s The Captain And The Child.
‘The most piano-oriented album of my career’
The preliminary periods for the album came about at The Village Studios in Los Angeles early in 2012, and an autumn launch was earmarked. However the longer Elton lived with the recordings, the extra he knew that they wanted one thing further. The road date moved to February, after which, at his live performance in Perth in November 2012, he introduced that The Diving Board had been put again once more, to Might.
Shopping for extra time, Elton and Bernie Taupin wrote 4 new songs, recorded at The Village in simply two days, a 12 months after the primary recording periods and with the identical group of musicians. For under the second time in nearly 1 / 4 of a century, that line-up didn’t embrace any of Elton’s longtime collaborators.
As a substitute, this time, the forged featured esteemed keyboard participant Keefus Ciancia, drummer Jay Bellerose, and different such notables as Raphael Saadiq on bass and guitarist Doyle Bramhall II. There have been additionally a number of appearances on tambourine by Jack Ashford, veteran percussionist in Motown’s peerless studio crew, The Funk Brothers.
The album even briefly modified title throughout its incubation, to Voyeur, the title of one other of its tracks. Within the new 12 months of 2013, Taupin wrote on his web site: “Seeing that we’re in no rush to get this record out there, we just felt the bug to get back in and cut some more material. We’re pretty happy with what we’ve already laid down but there’s always room for improvement. If you’ve got some good songs up your sleeve that can spice up the mix and enhance what’s already there, it would be a shame not to make use of the free time.”
‘This is the album I should be making’
Make use of it they did. By February, Elton was telling mates that The Diving Board was “the most piano-oriented album of my career.” He defined to a small gathering at Village Studios that its musical influences have been “everything I love about American music. This is the album I should be making after The Union.”
Lastly mounted for a September launch, The Diving Board was previewed by two lead songs. “Home Again,” issued in June, was a chic sluggish reflection that later added horns, organized by Darrell Leonard, to Taupin’s wistful look over his shoulder (“We all dream of leaving, but wind up in the end/Spending all our time trying to get back home again”). Two weeks earlier than the album’s launch got here “Mexican Vacation (Kids In The Candlelight),” its bluesy sway in some distinction to the commonly contemplative temper of what was about to observe.
Followers have been delighted to listen to Elton the pianist reclaiming the nimble brilliance that solely amplified the influence of his vocals and Taupin’s lyrics. Such renewed readability was evident from the very opening seconds of observe one, “Oceans Away,” on which John’s keyboards and vocals have been totally unaccompanied. Taupin famous that the tune was written “in memory of my father, Captain Robert Taupin, and the Great Generation.” Bernie had grown up on the farm owned by Taupin, Sr, within the Fenlands of Lincolnshire.
The next “Oscar Wilde Gets Out” was tastefully adorned by the cellos of Stjepan Hauser and Luka Sulic. The 2 halves of Croatian duo 2Cellos, they’d impressed Elton a lot that he invited them to tour with him in 2011 and past, together with on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Live performance at Buckingham Palace in June 2012.
“A Town Called Jubilee” had a gospel-style choir organized by Invoice Maxwell, with Ashford taking part in the identical block he had hit for Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’. The identical churchy really feel adorned “Take This Dirty Water,” whereas “Can’t Stay Alone Tonight” reminded us of Elton’s aptitude within the nation idiom.
It joined an inventory that included the Tumbleweed Connection spotlight “Country Comfort” and “Turn The Lights Out When You Leave,” from 2004’s Peachtree Highway. The pithy lyrics of “My Quicksand,” in the meantime, have been completely matched to a fragile remedy by Elton on the Yamaha, with an adroitly jazzy core.
‘Quite an achievement’
The Diving Board entered the UK chart at No.3 and the Billboard 200 at No.4, and was largely greeted with large heat by the world’s media. Andy Gill in The Impartial made it his album of the week, writing: “The singer has matched Bernie Taupin’s best crop of lyrics for years with his own most emotively apt melodies to produce a collection that both harks back to the intrigues and interests of his earliest recordings, yet manages to break new ground, quite an achievement for an artist in his sixth decade.”
In The Boston Globe, Sarah Rodman admired the best way that the album was “putting John’s piano and voice front and centre, offering memorable melodies, and scraping off the production glop to reveal again the musician, the vocalist, the emotional artist still alive under John’s shiny shell of professional fabulousness.”
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