Kitt's Music Musings

The Captain and the Kid, Elton John’s 2006 follow up to his 1975 classic Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, has proven to be one of his most critically-acclaimed releases in a career spanning nearly forty years; Q magazine describes it as “Elton's best album since, well, Captain Fantastic” , while Mojo credits the record with “the kind of narrative weight seldom found elsewhere today” . However, the previous two studio albums from Elton John were equally lauded on their release, and The Times notes this fact when it accuses Elton John of being “the little boy who cried return to form too often” . But while John can scarcely be criticized for returning to his roots as a serious album artist, The Times here inadvertently put their finger on one reason why 2004’s Peachtree Road is already something of a forgotten classic in Elton’s back catalogue: while 2001’s Song’s From the West Coast is still hailed as the album which saw a return to the strong songwriting of his 1970s heyday, and the new record is receiving similar attention by virtue of it’s newness, Peachtree Road, despite equally favourable reviews on its release, is hampered by being neither a new artistic statement nor the latest release.

The relatively poor sales of Peachtree Road have not aided its longevity in the public consciousness. While Songs From the West Coast peaked at #2 in the UK album charts, was certified Gold the week of its release, and was eventually certified Double-platinum, Peachtree Road failed even to crack the Top 20. Although the record was certified Gold within one month, it failed to reach a higher level of certification despite a re-release in July 2005, one week after Elton had enjoyed a three-week spell at the top of the UK singles chart as part of Tupac Shakur’s posthumous release, “Ghetto Gospel”, and the same week that his own single, “Electricity”, included as a bonus track on the re-packaged Peachtree Road, was peaking at no.4.

It is possible that some of the comments made by Peachtree Road’s creators at the time of its release are responsible for its apparent unattractiveness to record buyers. Bernie Taupin’s explanation – “When we first started considering doing a new album, it was coming on the heels of an album that was pretty dark; I felt it was necessary to do something that was totally the opposite of that, almost [to] do something that was like a buoyant pop album” – almost create the expectation that this is a return to the unchallenging, middle-of-the-road music that made up much of their output in the 1990s. He goes on to describe how “the things that Elton was coming up with were more soulful, they were more elevating; they’re songs of peace, love, and understanding – and hope”, and Elton himself has commented that “Answer in the Sky [and] All That I’m Allowed […] give messages of hope in an era when we need as much hope as we can get”. One cannot help but speculate whether this is all carefully manufactured spin designed to increase the record’s appeal in a climate that may not be accepting of what is an uncharacteristically bleak Elton John album. If so, then it evidently failed: Peachtree Road was Elton John’s lowest-charting lp since 1986’s career-nadir Leather Jackets.

The concord between Elton and Bernie’s appraisals ignores the fact that one of the major strengths of the album lies in the tension between the music and lyrics: in the same way as Honky Chateau’s “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself”, in which Bernie’s suicide-note lyrics are given the full music hall treatment by Elton (replete with “Legs” Larry Smith’s tap dancing solo, no less), here Elton’s uplifting, soulful melodies on the two singles he cited earlier as giving “messages of hope” are imbued with a bitterly ironical streak by Bernie’s doleful lyrics.

The chief refrain of “Answer in the Sky”, the first U.S. single from the album, posits the assertion, “sometimes you’ll find an answer in the sky”; but only sometimes, most of the time, you will not. There is hope here, certainly, but nine times out of ten it will prove to be false hope: “You might see celestial light”, considers Bernie, but underlying that observation is the unspoken rejoinder that you probably will not. The speaker in the song insists that he is “banking on a chance that we believe that good can still control the hearts of men”. But consider the remove this puts him at – he doesn’t know that good can wield this power, rather he would be willing to bet that there is a chance that some people at least credit the notion that it might. As a statement of faith, this falls far short of firm conviction, and the song’s ultimate message, that “all life is precious, and every day’s a prize” is qualified by the repetition at the song’s close that “sometimes you’ll find an answer in the sky”: most of the time, things are not going to go your way, but the merest chance that now and again they might makes getting up in the morning a worthwhile enterprise. There is, then, a note of optimism here, but it is far from a straightforwardly upbeat proposition. Elton’s robust vocal, and the Philly Soul string arrangement might suggest otherwise, but his confident delivery of words which only counterfeit firm statements of belief reveals a figure who is effectively bluffing; if the song attempts to sermonize, then it does so through a voice which has lost faith in its own advice.

The first single in the UK was “All That I’m Allowed (I’m Thankful)”, which is, perhaps surprisingly, the bleakest song on the record. The original album release in November 2004 did not contain a lyric booklet, and that fact has to be in part responsible for songs like “Answer in the Sky” being so misunderstood and underappreciated. But there is none of that song’s subtlety here; this song hammers its point home with unmistakeable clarity:

Breaking down never seems to be that hard,
Falling short is always in the cards,
I’m on the road, sun rising at my back,
Lost it all somewhere between the cracks.
I always hoped that I’d do better,
That I’d come out on top for once,
We all get what we’re delivered,
Then there are the lucky ones.

Clearly the speaker here does not consider himself one of the “lucky ones”: the speaker here is not, then, likely to be Elton or Bernie themselves. However, the fact that Elton John – successful musician, multimillionaire shopaholic, contented partner in a committed and enduring relatationship – is giving voice to these words gives the casual listener cause to ignore the sentiments of the verses and concentrate solely on misinterpreting the lines of the chorus:

And I've got all that I'm allowed
It'll do for me, I'm thankful now
The walls get higher every day
The barriers get in the way
But I see hope in every cloud
And I'm thankful, thankful
I'm thankful, So thankful
I'm thankful, I've got all that I'm allowed

Of course one can hardly imagine Elton John, or Bernie Taupin for that matter, being anything but thankful for the hand that life has dealt them. However, that is not what is happening here; neither Elton nor Bernie is the speaker in this piece, and what is being expressed is manifestly not a note of gratitude. The phrase “it’ll do” suggests frustration at something that is not as good as it ideally would be, but to which there is scant alternative. On top of that, life is getting tougher and tougher as “the walls get higher every day”. And though the speaker professes to see “hope in every cloud”, we have only to refer back to “Answer in the Sky” to see that such hope is seldom fruitful. Given all this, it is difficult to see the relentless repetition of “I’m Thankful” as anything but bitter irony. Furthermore, who is the figure that allocates these shares of happiness? Where is the fairness in that the speaker has only the meagre amount he has been allowed, when there are "lucky ones" who receive so much more? The song challenges the notion of a fair ordering principle in the universe, and by implication, the notion of a God; we may "all get what we're delivered", but do we all get what we deserve?

Elton’s production and performance on the song serve to heighten the irony. The virgin.net album reviewer suggests, derogatorily, that “All That I'm Allowed sounds rather like something a dodgy boyband would foist on an unsuspecting – nay, innocent – public” , not realising that this is precisely the point of the song, not to mention the album as a whole. At times this LP may appear to cater to the kind of audience who lapped up the worst of Elton’s middle-of-the-road, adult-contemporary music in the 1990s, but it simultaneously challenges and uproots the cosy worldviews of that very audience. The production on this track echoes Elton’s 80’s attempts at soul music; but where the tracks on Ice On Fire were ultimately disposable slices of pop, here Elton’s soul music is truly soul-searching. It helps that his vocals are as strong as they have ever been on record; wrought where necessary, to match the weariness of the songs’ speakers, but as finely nuanced and ultimately more beautiful than they have been for many years.

Indeed, the very first words of the album, in the song “The Weight of the World”, are “I’m weary”. And despite the speaker’s insistence that “the weight of the world is off my back”, Elton’s tired vocal and plodding piano chords suggest otherwise. The first verse begins:
I’m weary and I’m staying up late
And the rain hits my roof so hard.

Joined only by the conjunction “and”, we are left guessing as to the precise causality in this progression. The speaker does not claim to be weary because he is staying up late, but that he is weary and staying up late. The weariness appears prior: “I’m weary” becomes almost a statement of a permanent condition, before the precise details of his current situation are explained. Again, he does not profess to be staying up late because the rain hits his roof so hard; there is no direct causal relationship between the two, and the rain becomes just one further irritation to add to the insomnia and the weariness. Appropriately enough, Elton’s piano chords shift uncomfortably over a sustained bass note, not finding resolution until the line, “I know I’m no longer thirty these days”. The fact that this line is reached with a minor chord (as is “happy today, happy to play” in the chorus) imbues it with a tinge of regret; Elton may sing, “I’m amazed that I’m still around”, but his sadness that he is no longer the young man he once was is evident.

This is a reflective album, and unmistakably it is the product of an older artist who has seen hard times and come through them, who, “when [he] fell [he] got up and crawled out of the cracks”. The Captain and the Kid is almost rendered superfluous, and is certainly a far less subtle piece of artistry than its predecessor, where the biography is borne unmistakably but unobtrusively within the music. One of the strengths of the most recent LP is that which was referred to as its “narrative weight”, the fact that as a whole work it coheres, and achieves more as an album than simply being a collection of songs. The Captain and the Kid hangs together by virtue of its autobiographical structure; Peachtree Road relies on more subtle means to become greater than the sum of its parts. There is continuity between the lyrics in several songs on the album that links them together and allows one to be read back through another. Take, for example, another unquestionably bleak lyric from “It’s Getting Dark in Here”:

It's getting dark in here, don't want to leave,
Shadow's falling and I believe,
Winds picking up, thing's so unclear,
I'm afraid of my shadow
And it's getting dark in here.
I'm scared of strangers on the street,
World's so ugly I can't breathe,
Moon's so spooky I'm close to tears,
I've lost it all
And it's getting dark in here.

The moon has figured already in “Porch Swing in Tupelo” – “it’s empty as the moon, this place here on earth”, and in “All That I’m Allowed” – “I can’t say now, I didn’t want the moon”. The song immediately prior to “It’s Getting Dark in Here”, “Too Many Tears”, opens by questioning “did you see the first man on the moon”, before noting “something like the moon, something like a star that’s lost it’s way”, which appears to tie these two observations together. The moon, then, is used as a metaphor for emptiness, for impossible ambition thwarted, for impossible ambition fulfilled, and for the feeling of homelessness that is sometimes a side-effect of such achievement, before returning, in “It’s Getting Dark in Here” to the emptiness of “Porch Swing in Tupelo”, this time though it is an emotional and spiritual emptiness. There is therefore a logical progression through all these uses of the moon as metaphor, and a cyclical quality to its eventual return. There is a similar cycle at work with the “shadow falling” here which points obliquely back to “All That I’m Allowed”. In that song, as the sun was “rising at my back”, so the speaker’s shadow would be falling in front of him. In case this reference goes unnoticed, the chorus of “It’s Getting Dark in Here” observes, in a more direct parallel with “All That I’m Allowed”, that “the sun’s always setting on my life”. The cyclical nature of succession is also acknowledged directly in “Too Many Tears”, where we are told that “some things die so other things might live” – just as some people have to make do with all that they’re allowed so that the lucky ones, seemingly unfairly, get so much more.

The rising and falling of moon and sun, of bleakness turning to optimism and back again, works its way through the album, so that the seemingly positive messages of songs like “My Elusive Drug” and “Freaks in Love” are qualified by their position in proximity to songs with an irrepressibly bleak world view. Even these songs, however, have a fundamental relationship with ideas of loss and regret. In “My Elusive Drug”, the speaker looks back on his past with a certain fondness: “Most times I’ve been happy”, “And if I look back now, I’ve had my share of luck”. The music in the chorus rises to an emotional crescendo as the speaker appears to acknowledge that in his present situation he is the happiest he’s ever been. However, it’s a quiet kind of happiness: “I may paint your picture, and I might grow a beard”; the emotional rollercoaster of his past when he was “loose as a cannon and dumb as a wall” has been left behind. But read in conjunction with “The Weight of the World”, which professes similar sentiments (“I’m happy to play one or two hands of cards”) less convincingly, there is always a lingering suspicion that, were it possible, the speaker would exchange his current emotional stability for past excitement.

As the album closer, “I Can’t Keep This From You” takes those emotions that the album has been exploring: pain, loss, longing and regret, and transforms them into something truly positive – a declaration of love. Despite his fears and insecurities: that he’ll be laughed at and called crazy, that he already looks like a fool, the speaker resolves to make his feelings known. In the process he hits upon a universal truth; that “anything is better now than going through my life this way”. In other words, if things cannot possibly get any worse, then they can only get better. This is perhaps where the messages of hope lie in this album: the album paints a world that is unremittingly bleak, but such a world can only be improved; so long as desolation has not yet turned to despair, then there is still hope. As the music swells and soars to its triumphant climax, the notes of optimism that have until this point been repressed are aloud to burst into view: there’s even a brief moment where Elton reaches into his falsetto range, almost unheard for decades, a moment which seems to connect present and past in a way which challenges the album’s insistence that the past is “out of reach, somewhere beyond this room”. The speaker in “I Can’t Keep This From You” may not get the answer he wants, but he's lost nothing by his declaration: you may not find an answer in the sky, but "there's no price to ask why".