I was sitting here in front of a blank screen thinking 'I should blog this evening' but I've written so much today alongside of compiling two interviews, that I've got nothing left.
My partner for this evening's non-happening blog post is Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It's good for the soul to travel back to a time when you were allowed to develop as an artist before the world felt the need to write you off with the Sharpie of the Universe. Bernie Taupin is one of my favourite songwriter's of all-time. Would he get away with such creativity now? Doubtful.
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is Elton John's seventh album. Read it again - seventh. Most bands don't get that far anymore but if you travel back through the previous six albums, I would venture an educated guess that even an above average music fan will only have heard of half a dozen songs across the entire board. That's one song per album. That's six songs out of sixty or seventy - and those are the songs that actually made it to the albums. Can you imagine what got left on the cutting room floor?
Out of interest here, if you jump forward an album to Caribou and look at the track listing, you'll find the seminal Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me arrives at track nine. On the original vinyl version, there are only ten tracks. Today, that's called commercial suicide - and it would be sad if the only reason you know what I'm talking about is because George Michael dug it up for you. It's the only version I ever hear on the radio.
Anyway, Goodbye, is probably the best known of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's albums (sorry, they always come together like that in my book and always will), but one of the best songs they ever wrote - All The Girls Love Alice - I've never heard anywhere outside of myself playing it. Again, this is the last track on side three of the double album. If you would care to rub that up against any album released since something like, 1979... well, it just doesn't happen.
Nobody buries magic anymore. Nobody lets people discover magic for themselves. It all has to be upfront and explained in a show on Sky. No surprises. Nothing to feel smug about. Nothing to be frightened about. Nothing that might shake your foundation and cause you to spill your apples.
Buried magic is the best kind. When you have to dig deep for magic and you actually find it - those are the moments that change your life in 'Ways'.
It makes me want to publish a book and never talk about it. Maybe produce just twelve copies of it and hand them out to people I know won't write about it online - or anywhere else for that matter. People that will leave them to live amongst all of their other books, only for them to be discovered many years down the line upon death. The idea of such a thing turning up in a second hand store in 2067 and being picked up by a magic-hunter is very appealing in a cosmic alternate reality that exists only inside of me. Why would anybody care?
Well, that's the whole point. If everybody cares, it's not magic. Magic is tiny in its delivery - it doesn't exist how you think it does. It's so tiny, it's a universe all by itself. If it wasn't tiny, you wouldn't be able to carry it around in your ear.