UNIVERSAL
There’s a curious similarity between the opening, vamping piano chords of the lead single from this 2001 album, I Want Love, and John Lennon’s Imagine. Unintentional, we’re sure, but appropriately weighty, as the song is perhaps Elton’s most important of the last couple of decades: as personal and intimate as Lennon’s was global and oblique.
Elsewhere, songs such as The Ballad Of The Boy In The Red Shoes and Birds could have come from one of Elton’s most powerful and memorable late-70s albums. Perhaps what brought his songwriting out of the doldrums for this record was a remarkable twist in an already unique songwriting partnership: each song was a collaboration with Bernie Taupin, of course, but this was the first time they’d actually written together in person. Which is going some, when you consider this is Elton’s 27th album.
This vinyl reissue replicates the 2001 tracklist with 12 songs across two discs. Which means you’ll have to head to Spotify for a – very random – selection of bonus tracks such as Junior Vasquez’s Earth Mix of Original Sin and Teardrops, a collaboration with Lulu. This is the first time this album has been widely available on vinyl. We say widely, as its first pressing came last year, when it was included in an ultra-deluxe boxset available only at Burberry – and now on an eBay site near you – which housed a selection of six albums handpicked by Elton to summarise his career between 1970 and 2001.