For megastar, it’s a ‘Wonderful Crazy Night’ Elton’s in a happy place

By Randy Lewis

Los Angeles Times

In addition to his myriad accomplishments as an artist, Elton John has long maintained a reputation as a tastemaker.

He’s been an early champion of emerging pop acts from Swing Out Sister and Eminem in the ’80s and ’90s through current stars Ed Sheeran and the Weeknd, thanks to a voracious appetite for the music industry’s latest releases.

Yet when he took the stage recently at the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles for a question-and-answer session in front of no more than 60 people, including his press reps and the technical crew for the satellite radio special he was taping (premiered Friday on SiriusXM), he cited one of his own celebrated forebears as his recent inspiration.

“When Bob Dylan came out with ‘Modern Times’ [in 2006], that had a huge impact,” John, 68, said, explaining that it demonstrated Dylan’s lack of interest in keeping up with trends in contemporary pop music. That helped trigger a new perspective that manifested in his 2010 album, “The Union,” in which he collaborated with his long-ago hero Leon Russell, and the inward-looking 2013 album “The Diving Board.”

“I don’t have to go chasing the hit single anymore,” John said a few days later, relaxing in the single-story Beverly Hills home that he and his husband, David Furnish, bought three years ago after the birth of their second son, Elijah. Its midcentury walls are covered with pieces from an extensive art and photography collection, another manifestation of John’s passion for artistic expression.

“I can just do what I like. It’s freedom – freedom from having to be worrying about whether I have a chart single,” he said. “I don’t have to worry about that. And then you look at Adele, and you think, [Wow!] it’s their time now – it’s not my time.”

That sense of recalibrated expectations is at the heart of his new album, “Wonderful Crazy Night.” The album is again produced by T Bone Burnett and features John’s longtime songwriting partner, lyricist Bernie Taupin. But in a significant departure from the previous two albums, “Wonderful Crazy Night” finds John back in the recording studio with his touring band, which includes guitarist Davey Johnstone, drummer Nigel Olsson and percussionist Ray Cooper.

“After I made the first two records with T Bone,” John said, “I wanted to make a joyous record because I’m in a joyous place. I have a great band, I have a great career, I have a great relationship with my husband, I have two wonderful children – you know, I’m pretty damn lucky. I just wanted to go back and make a record that sounds like what we’re playing on stage.”

Another difference in the making of “Wonderful Crazy Night” was his request for Taupin to “write a lot of up-tempo lyrics. I said, ’I’m not very good at writing up-tempo songs, but we’re going to make a joyous record. Even if the songs are slow, I want the lyrics to be joyous. I don’t want any sadness on this record.

“I love a good, miserable song,” he said with a laugh, “and Bernie and I can write one of those every five minutes.”

Taupin, in a separate interview from his home in the mountains of Santa Ynez north of Santa Barbara, said the edict – and the timing – of the new album “threw me for a loop.

“I wasn’t really expecting to be making another record so soon after ‘The Diving Board,’” Taupin, 65, said. “His idea of making it upbeat, joyful and positive – that was also somewhat of a surprise, due to the fact that I usually set the tenor of the records.

“My direction is usually to be slightly oblique and write lyrics that are metaphor-riddled, to let people figure out some things for themselves. But once I got past that and put on my happy hat, it was kind of liberating,” Taupin said. “I hadn’t written anything like that in so long. I much prefer writing songs that are a little darker in nature, that deal with the underbelly of society. But when I actually thought about it, and look back at our body of work, I realized it’s riddled with up-tempo, not necessarily positive, but certainly joyous subject matter. So it’s not something totally new to me.”

Added John: “I haven’t really written an album this up-tempo since ‘Rock of the Westies,’ and I think this is a better album than that.”

It opens with the brightly energetic title track, moves into an achingly lovely ballad, “Blue Wonderful,” and on to a big arena ballad, “A Good Heart,” which heaps appreciation on a loved one’s fundamental kindnesses. It also contains “I’ve Got 2 Wings,” a number cited by John, Taupin and Burnett as a favorite for its true-life portrait of mid-20th-century Louisiana preacher Rev. Utah Smith, who conducted his services while playing an amplified Gibson guitar and wearing white wings on his back. The album’s musical settings cover a broad range of moods, but the overall sentiment is, as John indicates, positive and life-affirming.

Where the album will fit into the current musical landscape remains to be seen, although that hasn’t been a major priority for any of the principals who made it.

“I don’t know what the musical landscape is anymore, really,” Burnett said with a laugh in a separate interview. “There are so many places where it’s happening now. I think, more than anything, when doing this kind of thing with Elton, you’re doing it for history. It becomes part of a very long and important story.”