Elton John "And the House Fell Down"

My personal pantheon of Elton John records is constructed thusly: Number one: Tumbleweed Connection (especially "Son of Your Father"). Number two: Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (no pun intended, folks). Number three: 1983's Too Low for Zero, a comeback record of sorts that contains one of my all-time favorite songs, in terms of sentimental attachment, "I'm Still Standing." The video for that song (Youtube), with all of its multi-hued, painted, and immobile bodies, is probably my earliest MTV memory (or it's at least even with "Rockit" and the Tubes' "She's a Beauty"), but it's the song's unceasingly positive melodic structure, coupled with John's voice and the "yeah yeah yeah"'s that have made it age incredibly well, much moreso than so much else from that era (or, for that matter, of John's personal discography). Anyhoo, his new record The Captain and the Kid, the obvious sequel to Fantastic, is probably his best full-length since Zero, comfortably topping 2001's pretty good Songs from the West Coast. It's supposed to be a diary of John and Bernie Taupin's lives and timeses during the recording of that 1975 double-album, and from that perspective, "And the House Fell Down" (mp3) is the record's best song, and what do you know, it's melodically reminiscent of that jam called "I'm Still Standing." Funny how these things work. But that's not even the greatest thing about the song, because it's a yarn of drug-induced paranoia, with lyrics like "Oh the TVs on and the colors really hurt my head, if I could think straight I'd wish I was dead," and of course "Three days on a diet of cocaine and wine, and a little weed just to level me sometime, I put the clock in the drawer 'cause I've cancelled out the time." It's brutally easy to imagine John and Taupin hunched together under a massive ivory piano in some decadent Hollywood Hills mansion, clutching a bottle of Merlot and wondering who stole the blasted tiger. In that sense, then, it's the thematic opposite of "Standing," the moment where John reclaimed himself and re-jump-started his (MTV) career with Bernie in tow, a mere eight or nine years after the piano debacle.









Buy The Captain and the Kid here.







ALSO: James Woodley runs a blog called headphonesex. He also survived the Bali bombing four years ago. He's raising money for this charity by selling CDs on eBay. I'm going to send him a bunch, and you need to as well. Here's the post with the information.