Elton John: The Songwriter Who Wrote the Music in Fifteen Minutes

Bernie Taupin writes the lyrics. Elton John sits down at a piano with the finished page in front of him, reads it like sheet music he hasn't seen before, and puts a melody underneath it, sometimes in as little as fifteen minutes. He rarely changes a word Taupin gives him. He just has to find the music the words were already implying.

That's an unusual enough skill that it's worth separating out from Taupin's side of the partnership, which gets the lyric-writing credit most people know. The speed and instinct on the other end of that envelope, turning someone else's finished page into a melody almost as fast as he can read it, is entirely Elton's own.

A scholarship kid who could already sight-read anything

Elton was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight in 1947 in Pinner, England, and was talented enough at the piano by age eleven to win a junior scholarship to London's Royal Academy of Music, attending Saturday classes there for four years. That early, formal grounding in reading and interpreting music on sight is a large part of why he could later take a page of somebody else's words and hear a finished melody in it almost immediately, rather than needing to build one slowly from scratch. He took his stage name from two bandmates in the group Bluesology, saxophonist Elton Dean and singer Long John Baldry, well before Taupin's lyrics ever reached him.

Reading a lyric the way other people read a chord chart

The mechanics of how Elton actually writes are close to unique in popular music: Taupin hands over a complete lyric with no music attached, and Elton treats it almost like a piece of sheet music he's sight-reading for the first time, finding the melody the words are already suggesting rather than building one independently and fitting words to it after. He's described sometimes finishing several songs in a single day this way, working through a stack of Taupin's pages one after another. It's the reverse of how most music-and-lyrics partnerships work, where the tune usually comes first and the words get fitted to it. Elton fits the music to words that already exist, at a speed that would be impossible if he had to think his way through it rather than simply hear it.

Half an hour, for a song millions of people would end up owning

In September 1997, days after Princess Diana's death, Taupin rewrote the lyrics to "Candle in the Wind," originally a 1973 tribute to Marilyn Monroe, into a tribute for Diana, dictating the new verses over a transatlantic phone call in about half an hour. Elton performed the new version at her funeral at Westminster Abbey and recorded it days later. "Candle in the Wind 1997" sold more than thirty-three million copies, making it the best-selling physical single in history, and Elton donated all the proceeds, raising more than $47 million for the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. It's a strange kind of songwriting milestone, a rewrite of an old song, finished in half an hour under the worst possible circumstances, that outsold everything else either of them had ever released.

A career built on outlasting its own worst chapter

Elton's run through the 1970s, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Rocket Man, Bennie and the Jets, made him one of the biggest acts in the world, and the decade that followed very nearly ended it: addiction, exhaustion, and a public life that had outpaced what he could sustain privately. "I'm Still Standing," written for 1983's Too Low for Zero, doubled as a fairly direct account of surviving that stretch and coming out the other side of it, a song about persistence written by someone who'd just proven it in his own career rather than someone speculating about what it might feel like.

What's worth taking from his career

Elton became the nineteenth person in history to complete an EGOT, winning the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony, when Elton John Live: From Dodger Stadium took the Emmy for outstanding variety special in January 2024, more than fifty years after his first hit with Taupin. His side of that fifty-seven-year partnership is a case for a specific, less celebrated songwriting skill: not originating the idea, but hearing what's already latent in someone else's finished words fast enough, and accurately enough, to get out of the way and let the song exist.

If you've got the words and need someone who can hear the melody hiding inside them, or the melody and need someone else's finished page to build it around, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Britannica, Royal Academy of Music, American Songwriter: The Origin Story of Reginald Kenneth Dwight, Official Charts: Candle in the Wind 1997 at 20, Washington Post: Elton John Achieves EGOT Status