Switched on Pop - The Man Behind the Rocketman with Giles Martin

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

Rocketman is a spectacle the size of Elton John, four films in one. It contains a biopic, jukebox musical, addiction recovery story and a romance between friends. The soundtrack ties the story together by taking historical liberties to tell a fantastical story about one of the best living songwriters. Charlie is joined by Vox’s film critic, Alissa Wilkinson to breakdown the film and deconstruct how its melodic themes create an emotional arc. He also speaks with Giles Martin (son of 5th Beatle George Martin) who music directed the film and soundtrack about how he assembled an entire life’s work into a singular narrative. Songs Discussed Taron Egerton - RocketmanQueen - Bohemian RhapsodyTaron Egerton, Jamie Bell - Goodbye Yellow Brick RoadKit Connor & Gemma Jones & Bryce Dallas Howard & Steven Mackintosh - I Want LoveTaron Egerton - Crocodile RockTaron Egerton - Your SongTaron Egerton - Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest WordMozart - Requiem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter

Charlie Harding. Nate is on vacation, but I've got a great show for you today. I'm going to speak with Giles Martin, who is the modern torchbearer of the Beatles' catalog. He's the son of George Martin, the Fifth Beetle, and has spent much of his career, reworking, remastering, and making beautiful sounds of the Beatles' original recording. He's also most recently done all of the music direction and production for the film Rocket Man. So, does a fat boy from nowhere get to be a soul man? Gotta kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you want to be. I'm thinking it's changing my name to Elton.

To help us understand this film, how it functions, how it relates to other musicals, first we're going to speak with Alyssa Wilkinson, the film critic at Vox, then we're going to go to Giles, then we're going to come back with me and Alyssa because I've got this. sort of crazy theory about how all the music comes together in the film and I need to see if I'm totally nuts or if I'm making any sense here. First, welcome Alyssa to the show. Thanks for having me. You wrote a review for Vox on the film, Rocket Man. And you describe it as nearly as shiny and explosive as its subject. So I think right off the bat, we need to get a little bit of a taste of that subject and listen to a clip of Rocket Man.

And I think I'm not done there. They think I am at home. Oh, no, no, no. You ever heard that one? Once or twice, you know, you're in there. First, I want to understand your review, which sort of frames this as not your typical musical biopic. It's an interesting film, I think, as a musician biopic,

because it does follow a lot of the same contours as most biopics about musicians do. You know, the discovery of this musician, the moment where they compose their future big hit, and then their rise. And then usually there's like a giant crash, and it's almost always because they get addicted to something. And all of that is in this film. That is very much the story of Rocket Man.

But this one's a little different because it's also a jukebox musical. And it's not a jukebox musical that uses the music just in order to kind of tell us what was being written at which time. Yeah, you described this movie as not just one film, but rather four films in one as a biopic, a jukebox musical, as you just said, an addiction story and a romance. Can you help me break down those four films that are encompassed all in this single screenplay? Sure. So, I mean, first we have the biopic. This certainly is a story about the life of Elton John up to a certain point in his life, roughly around the late 80s, early 90s.

You know, you learn things about Elton John's life from the movie, although there's. There are lots of fudging of timelines going on in this film in order to make it work better as the second part, which is a jukebox musical. So what a jukebox musical is is a musical film or like maybe a Broadway show that focuses on popular music that's already familiar to the audience before they show up. So, you know, this started with the Beatles doing Hard Days Night and those sorts of films in the past and then has expanded to all kinds of different things. you might think of Mulan Rouge across the universe. Even the pitch perfect movies are kind of jukebox musicals because they're popular, partly because you are excited to hear these songs that you already love when you go in to hear them.

And there's some kind of a dramatic arc. And so that's what this is. The life of Elton John forms the dramatic arc for a jukebox musical, you know, scored by Elton John, which is kind of a funny way to tell a story, but it works quite well, I think, for this subject. And then we have it also framed as a story about addiction. The framing device is that he's sort of remembering his life in a AA group.

And he's in rehab. He's in recovery. And he's telling his own story in a group. So that's an addiction story. And it is one that looks at some of the effects of addiction and causes and how a person recovers from those illnesses and what it means to be in recovery. And then the fourth part is a romance, but it's not really about a romance in maybe the typical fashion. It's really about his relationship with Bernie Top and his longtime collaborator who writes the lyrics for his songs. And their relationship is really the healthiest thing in the film.

And it's kind of the backbone of the film as well. It's a beautiful part of the film. As we're getting into this conversation, people might be worried about are there any spoilers? And frankly, we kind of already know Elton's entire history. history. And that's sort of it, right? Yeah. He's a rock star. He had an addiction problem. He doesn't die. We know he's not dead, right? So there's like, there's not a lot to give away. And I think, I think the packaging of sort of four different structures into one is almost necessary when you know the entire story. You need that music sort of to drive the action to create the spectacle and the personal connection, uh, of both, uh, his romance with

Bernie and also his own personal addiction struggles to really drive an interesting story forward. because otherwise it's just any other rock and roll biopic narrative. That's right. And also, you know, Elton John is a very colorful figure who's been famous for most of his life. And so for a lot of people, the familiarity, it means that they don't really have to think about the story of his life at all. What you go to see when you go to see Rocket Man is music. And the movie very richly delivers. In fact, looking over the list of songs that are in the film, I was surprised by how many they managed to cram into it. and still have it work really well.

Yeah, and we're going to get more into how the music functions in the film. But first, I want to talk about how this film might succeed where others haven't in the past or might be in conversation with some other popular biopic musical. What do you call these things? Yeah, I mean, there aren't actually that many biopics that are both biopics and jukebox musicals. A lot of them tend to just stick the songs into places that they were actually being composed or that they were actually being sung, and this movie just sort of scatters them throughout wantonly.

It feels like you're watching a Broadway musical in a lot of ways. Absolutely. That is what I enjoyed about it. I'm probably avoiding the subject of Bohemian Rhapsody, which I've been doing for months. And I frankly thought that it fell extremely flat, largely due to how you just framed it, that the music is really sort of used within the film

as they're composing it, as they're playing on stage. And yet the film took such liberties with the choice, with the truth. Right. And I mean, you could say Rocket Man plays even more with the truth, but also it shows its hands like right off the top. You have songs that are happening at times that they definitely wouldn't have been happening. They weren't even written for another 25 years. So you kind of know going in that this is a fictitious version of a life and hopefully don't take anything to be too factual in the point is the music, right? The point is the character, but really the music itself. That's the main.

character of the film. I of course was surprised that, well, maybe unsurprised that Elton John was one of the producers on the film, obviously had a great creative hand. What did surprise me, though, was how poorly he comes across. I'm curious what we don't know, but he does not come off as a nice man through most of the film. Yeah, I guess it's not too surprising in that it feels like he has been willing to be up front about some of his struggles and his songs, granted, he doesn't write the lyrics, but they are very raw and vulnerable. So maybe that's kind of built into his music. But yeah, that's funny. Again, contrasted with Bohemian Rhapsody, which I think one of the problems with it, of course, Freddie Mercury is no longer with us, but the band was involved. And there's a

lot of buzz about how the band's involvement with the film may actually have resulted in it being a weaker film and a less truthful one about Freddie. Oh, interesting. Yeah. You said that this is maybe not the best biopic, but as a musical, I have to say, I thought it was really fun. I saw the film twice, and the second time around, I was just jiving to all of the musical numbers. There are dance scenes. There's all these moments in which the music actually sort of extends the sense of time in the film. Things slow down, people float up. It's truly fantastical. And I think that it felt appropriate to Elton John, whose music on one hand is incredibly emotional, raw. and real, but at the same time, he is part of the glam rock era, which is all about a sort of

return to the fun and goofiness and camp of early pop music as almost a response to the super seriousness of album-oriented rock that's happening at the late 60s, early 70s. It was just enjoyable. I really enjoyed the musical element of this film. Yeah, his over-the-top costumes and presentation have always been part of his act, basically since the beginning. and they make a point of that in this film. But it would have been so disappointing

to make a film about Elton John that was sort of stayed and very literalist about everything. Right off the top of this film, the first number is like song and dance happening on like a coldest act basically in Britain in the 50s. Some people are in color, some are in black and white.

They're singing the bitches back. I mean, it's like a real crazy opening number. But again, it has to be. a signal to you right off the top that this is a movie that is going to be sort of more of a memory, as if you've lived within Elton John's memory of his life, rather than read a Wikipedia article about him, which is often the feeling I got watching Bohemian Rhapsody by contrast. Yeah, this is a dreamscape. It's fun. You said in your article, it doesn't matter if you're a fan of Elton John or not, because you know his music. It's inescapable. Songs like your song,

Tiny Dancer, Rocket Man, you already know this music going in regardless of your relationship to him because, as the film establishes, at one point he was responsible for 5% of all global album sales in one year. So what I want to understand is how did this entire body of work

come together into a single cohesive film? And to do that, I want to take a quick break and go chat with Giles Martin about the making of the music. And after speaking with Giles, I want to come back and share my thoughts and findings about what is going on musically that makes this whole thing come together. So stick around.

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Quick note before we get started, some of the audio in this phone call is a little finicky, but I think you're still going to really enjoy it. Hi, I'm Charles Martin and the music producer and director for Rocket Man, the movie. Charles Martin, welcome to the show. I want to kick off and ask you first about your role in this film. You were the music director. What does it mean to music direct a musical biopic? I was responsible for all of the music in the film. And from the outset, Rocket Man is essentially, if anyone sees it, it's a musical. So really, it's converting the work of Elton John's catalogue into a musical for film. From training Taryn Edgerton to sing and to be Elton, to the arrangements of the songs and how the songs fit in the movie.

That was my job. Oh, my goodness. That is a overwhelming series of duties. And I am curious, what did it require to prepare for this role? Well, the first thing, I mean, it is such an overwhelming role with a picture like Rocket Man. But you don't really think of it at the time. I think maybe it's got a small brain. You start off going, okay, I'll meet Taryn.

And I read the script. And then talk to Dexter. And the two of us became good friends, him being the director. And we hit it off. and we just said, we both agreed that we didn't want it to be a jukebox musical in the sense of the songs just start out of nowhere and finish and they're taped on. So immediately, I thought about how we could change the arrangements of the songs and how the songs would fit in the script.

And I met Elton and Elton goes this and I love the fact you're doing this. I've met him before. I'd work with them before. And he just said, do whatever you like. I'll come to the premiere. And so you don't really, with a task like this, you don't really think about that. To me honestly, I was much bigger than I thought it was going to be when I started. Had I known, maybe I would have had a different approach.

But yeah, you just do it. You just do day by day, if you like. You are known for going through entire catalogs. You are sort of the master of the current Beatles catalog. And you have to go and digest a life's work. You know, a life's work, which is even larger than the Beatles, you know, short decade of music. How do you go about taking all that music and, building it into a single musical narrative that we can enjoy in just about two hours.

The advantage I have is that I know way less than other people do to a certain extent. I mean, when it comes to the Beatles, there's people who know way more about the Beatles and I do. I'm pretty good on keys and tempos on what's on the tracks. And then with Elton, you know, Lee Hall had written a very good script, and the songs were mapped out on the script, and we changed a few bits and pieces with where it was. And so it was just a question of You just absorb the artist And it's funny, you kind of

For me it's like working in the studios With an artist that isn't there You know, I started understanding how Elton plays the piano And his approach to songwriting And you know, just being a music fan And just loving music, you know, You just, you imbibed the stuff

And you have an empathy And I think you have to start From a point of knowing nothing And then realizing that you know Little afterwards, But try and try and bring what you know to the table, if you like. And so if you if you sit down and listen to 250 songs, that's not going to help you.

You have to just dig in and understand what the spine of the artist is, I suppose. The music uses music both as a musical, but also as a film score. And in terms of doing right by Elton, you're needing to adapt his work for new purposes that it had not been intended for. And I wanted to know about how you went about identifying essential themes, musical themes, that we're going to run through the film. Well, I mean, the great thing about Elton is he's got great melodies. I mean, there was a guy coming broad called Matthew Margeson, who I worked on the songs and he worked on the underscow. But even, but I was on the film before he was attached. So things like the opening Taran or Elton Walkers through the doors, I tried something around Yellowbrick Road in a different style, actually, to what we ended up with.

I spoke to Matthew Marginston and I said, you know, we need to apply Elton's melody to characters in the film or to emotional states in the film. The reason why we did that is because Elton has so much music. He has a melody flying out of him that it didn't make any sense to have someone else's melody in the film. And so, and it really is, if anyone's listening out there, if anyone wants to do this, it really is the question of, you know, you get things wrong and get things right. You try melodies with scenes and you try melodies with emotion and you can do what feels right. And Matthew and I, that's what we did. And the same with nuances of songs and the way songs begin in the movies. Music is part of their DNA.

You can't take it away from them. You know, you can't separate a player from how they are. And that's the way it works. These themes that become the underscore and backing to the rest of the musical seem to take on very strong emotional meaning. For example, the Yellow Brick Road theme recurs and recurs. It seems at some of the hardest moments in his life. And I'm curious how you decided to map certain themes to certain emotions.

They almost take on an operatic light motif kind of effect. Yeah, I mean, that was a collaborative decision on a number of our parts. I mean, obviously, I'm a big part of this. but it was, you know, Dexter as the director as well, as Tristick as the editor as the editor as well as, especially Matthew Margeson, trying different things. We used a boys choir for singing the high full set a bit and goodbye yellowstone road because it had this dreamy ethereal quality to it.

You know, we found that it's, there's, you know, what you can do in music is if you have a very sweet melody, you can actually, you know, by making it slightly modal, by holding a root note underneath it, you can make it suddenly very dark sounding. You can release the handbrake and open it out to be light. So in the movie, there's a scene with Bernie and Elton, and Bernie starts seeing, when are you going to come down to Elton in a restaurant?

And I had this idea of using very kind of strident strings, but slightly discordant. People don't pay to see Reginald Dwight. They pay to see Elton John. I mean, I'm following the melody a little bit in fifths. It's such a great melody that Good by Yellow Rick Road. And so if you have great melody, you can play around with that melody. You're much better off, you're much better starting with great melody and destroying it than having no melody and trying something else.

That makes sense. That's beautiful. As you said, you had a lot of creative license. You were sort of handed this music. What were the largest creative leaps that you took with this material in ways of deviating from the original? And why would you make those kind of choices? I mean, honky cat, I end up using the rhythm section from Sheik with, because I want more of us kind of like, you know, sort of a funk style. And yeah, just, I mean, I don't know, everything, you know, apart from your side, I guess, and some of the songs we use as background, changed.

It just morphed. And then the worrying thing, a bit like The Love Show, you know, the bit one thing is people go, and now you need to make an album and you do an album and people go, is this guy completely crazy? why has done this version of a song? And I go, what's the movie? What's the movie? I'm not completely mad. Yeah, this must be one of those things that you hadn't realized that was going to be a much bigger undertaking

than had originally been promised because on top of having to produce all of the music for the film, you also have produced a musical soundtrack. And I have to say, when I went and started doing research for this piece and started listening to the soundtrack, I was really wowed. This music is in an entirely new, context, but it is produced so brilliantly and it helps me enjoy the music in a new way,

rather than being a pastiche sort of of the original. And I think you've done a really amazing job with that undertaking. Oh, well, thank you. I mean, I should mention, actually, my favorite bit on the movie, funny off, that I did was Rocket Man, which is good, it sounds good on the soundtrack. And this is a good example of, of the scariness of suddenly having to create a soundtrack because the Rocket Man in the movie basically starts on the bottom

of a swinging pool and that ends up at the Dodger Stadium and I had to work out a way to make Rock a man into a stadium song which it isn't and it's funny

Matthew Vaughner producer phoned me after I did it and goes Have you been listening comfortably numb by Pink Floyd and I went why because the strings sound like that and I was like well that's a and then someone goes

it sounds like Sergeant Peppers and you go well that they're not bad references but the funny thing is is for that song I was listening to great gig in the sky by Pink Floyd because I thought I thought the opening if you listen to the underwater sequence the opening it's this actually the same chords it's the same it's the same

progression the same two chords anyway and I thought Greg in the sky always sounds underwater to me and I don't know why it just reminds you a waves but yeah the soundtrack I suppose the soundtrack was strange because I didn't think there would be a soundtrack and I had to piece it together from bits of the film and that was like and I phoned up taron and said listen you just come and sing a verse of rocket man because we never recorded it. You know, we only recorded the, you know, we only recorded what's in the film. Staying on Rocket Mansion for just a second, when the piece approaches the end, the whole thing sort of fades up in this wild string arrangement that suddenly ends in a big

reverb tail and piano smash in a way that was also very reminiscent of a day in the life. And I thought that was a fun little reference. We had a 50-piece choir in the, at our studios. And I was making them make the sound of rockets, basically. I got 50 people going, going, you know, rea, rea, rea, rea, re, sort of, you know, whatever noise they could make. To which, the choir master said,

some of the people in this choir are so old, they can only do planes, which is quite amusing. But, yeah, we, we, if people really saw what went on behind the scenes, I mean, the thing is to, and I said this to Taryn actually when we're recording, I went, it doesn't matter what you do, as long as, if you're enjoying yourself singing, then people, there's more chance that people enjoy listening to you. You know, the one thing I've learned is that you, you know,

you have this fantastic palette you can you can you can play around with i think you have played around that palette and really wonderful ways a lot of i've enjoyed so much of this film i wanted to ask you just one more question about it which was elton's piano playing we get um very frequent chromatic descent in his left hand it's this beautiful sort of lamenting quality which is this ancient technique we've talked about on our show before the lament which comes from uh centuries ago and it's just sort of this reified, cultural, musical signal of something is descending and it is sad and you should emotionally well up right now. So I think it's totally appropriate that we reference these things, which become sort of cultural signifiers. Yeah, and it's good that you're mentioning

mentioning his piano playing, because his piano playing was key for me for this movie, because I tried a bunch of people, and there's a friend of mine actually who plays in a lot of movies and a guy called Dave Hartley, and he could do Elton. He was the, only person I met that could do Elton. And in fact, funny enough, Elthons had him doing Elton before. You know, they, you know, you know, Elton knows him. And even with Dave, actually, you get certain introductions to songs like Honky Cat, which are really hard to emulate.

I mean, and, you know, just because, just because the strength of Elton's are playing. I mean, he is, he is a beast. People don't realize his left hand is, you know, you wouldn't want to be underneath his left hand. I mean, you know, it would go through you. He is power on those fingers. It's extraordinary. and the way he's very, very strident the way he plays in a very percussive way.

And for me to get that right was actually one of the biggest challenges for the whole film. I hear in that piano playing quality, the child prodigy that was playing classically complex, modulating, key-changing music. And you can see how it moves into a blues, New Orleans style piano, that merging, that particular training and early success on piano has got to be something which is not easy to find someone that can capture exactly that quality. You're absolutely right. And you know what it is. It's a lot of people who can play classically can't play rock and roll, but not with the right feel. They don't have the right swing to what they play. Their left hand becomes very rigid

in their phrasing. And Elton was unique in that. I can't think of any other classic train musician that managed to move into rock and roll without sounding muso, if that makes sense. It's one of those things with an artist, with a truly great artist, that the more you examine, the more appreciation you have for them, you know. Well, it really is a beautiful thing, and I want to say just great congratulations on the success of the score, of the musical, of this film. It was a great pleasure to get to speak with you. That's absolute pleasure. Thank you for the great question. And thank you for being interested in the music. I mean, you know, we love music here, so thank you to anyone listening as well.

Thank you very much. Okay, so Alyssa, I spoke with Giles and I saw the film for a second time, specifically tuned in to the musical qualities. And I started to hear how these themes were interconnecting. And I wanted to share this idea with you to see how the music creates emotional effect. So as a refresher, and to establish this music, can you take us to scene one of the film? Right off the top, and I think we think we know what we're seeing in this scene. he's in his orange jumpsuit with horns and sparkles and sequins on it, and he's bursting through a door. And it looks as if he's kind of walking towards a stage.

There's like light from behind him. He's walking down a hallway. Right. And we hear this overture that is this sort of orchestral arrangement drawn from Goodbye Yellowbrick Road as he's kind of walking down the hallway. So we think we know what we're about to see, which is him bursting out onto a stage and, you know, rocking an audience. but instead he comes through another door. Let's pause right there and take a listen to that overture that we get as devil-horned Elton is walking down a tunnel into the light. But he comes in, he sits down, and he plops down into a circle of people who are obviously having a meeting of some kinds and begins essentially telling his life story to this group of people while wearing this giant.

sequined orange costume with horns. And we find out, of course, this is not just any old meeting. This is an AA meeting. And the whole sort of framing of the film is around him telling his story while going through recovery. To your point, this film is an addiction recovery narrative. And the Yellow Brick Road theme takes on a very important quality here at the beginning of the film.

It's not just this moment of greeting. It really becomes one of the essential. musical themes of the film that's going to recur again and again. But it's going to sound different. It's going to sort of be orchestral, not the literal version of it. And so I just want to play how we hear the Yellow Blick Road theme as an orchestral piece. It's great. It's like it's got a great melodic contour. And I actually think in Yellowbrick Road, we get in many ways the entirety of both Elton John's music and the direction of the film. So in terms of sort of narrative direction, Yellow Brick Road is a song, which is about a hero's journey. It's about going down the

Yellowbrick Road. We have this Oz metaphor and eventually returning back home after a long adventure into the fantastical and disastrous. And so the song sets up the idea that we're going to be going on a hero's journey. And musically, we hear a lot of tropes that are common in Elton's music. The first, which you can hear in that theme, is just a powerful melodic contour. Here, it's sort of dissonant, it's a little open and ambiguous, and it suggests some kind of unease. When we look at the actual harmonic movement, we'll see that there's a lot of modal mixture, chords that don't fit in the scale. He likes to modulate. It'll go into an entirely new key.

The number one thing when I think of Elton John's music is chromatic descent in the bass. Are you familiar with this idea? Sort of a step down feeling. Right. The harmony keeps moving down, down, down, down, down. Goodbye Yellow Brook Road. We're going to come back to this. But sort of the most important song early on in a musical is a want song.

Did you identify any particular want songs in this film? Yeah, so right off the top. while there's still very much in Elton John's childhood early on, and the whole family is at dinner, sort of forlornly, he and his mother, who's very dissatisfied with her life, her mother, who's taking care of everyone and trying to hold the household together, and his father, who's just this distant, angry man, they start singing, I Want Love, which I believe was written in 2001.

So this scene is set 50 years before the song would be written, but they each take sort of different lines from it that seem in the moment to really express the longings they all feel for either to have love or to even just be able to love. That's baby Elton and then his dad comes in. This is a very literal want song, right? We know exactly what Elton wants. He wants to love and he wants love back. He wants love. There could not be a clear message of this movie.

We know exactly his character's motivation from the start. I, however, identified some other songs that maybe provided the conflict in the film because there are some other things that young Elton also wants. In fact, there's this beautiful early scene in which, Rocket Man comes in. Do you remember this moment? Yes, and it's clearly long before Rocket Man had entered the scene. But Young Elton is reading music in bed, and his mother comes into the room with a martini in her hand and says, you know, turn off the light and go to sleep. And he turns off the light, she shuts the door and he switches on his flashlight and starts conducting an imaginary

orchestra who are playing Rocket Man. Yeah. And we don't actually hear the lyric at this point. But you can see in young Elton's eyes that he wants to get in a rocket to stardom. He is excited to conduct an entire orchestra and have people follow his music. We get another hint of this as Elton quickly ages. We get all of his early years in a very short moment. And there's this pivotal moment when young Elton, whose name is not actually Elton, right? It's Reggie Dwight Reggie Dwight

Changes his name He says I wish I was someone else in the film And right after sort of declaring He wants to be someone else I think he starts to find Sort of his musical identity And we get the song

Crocodile Rock I was young And Susie had So much fun For me the other thing That Elton wants to bring back is the fun of early rock and roll. He finds his musical identity.

This song explodes into, this is sort of his big early moment on a stage, and everybody starts to sing along in chorus to, what a ridiculous song, right? And a song that was actually written two years after the scene in the film, but that's all right. It doesn't matter,

because we're just, we're along for the ride. I mean, here, I feel like crocodile rock, which is such a ridiculous song with that obnoxious nasal chorus with no words, really sort of captures what this other wants that he has, which is like he wants fame, he wants to be in rock and roll for the fun of it, that there doesn't have to be too much substance except for drugs,

which quickly enter the film, and we move from his early want of, you know, first he has the sort of Rocket Man thing, he wants love, he also wants to be a rock star. All these things are circulating in, and Elton at the beginning of the film. And I think the film is all about discovering which one is the

true thing. There is one really beautiful moment in the film where I think he begins to discover what we know is the actual want because I don't know about you. Have you think fame actually turns anyone into a better person? If it does, I don't know who that person is yet. I haven't found that person yet. So obviously like the fame has got to be. be a, is a straw man, right? It's all about love. And he actually has this beautiful moment where his career is going to take off, but just before everything is actually falling apart. There's sort of an early decline where he comes out to his girlfriend who breaks up with him. He gets kicked out of his house. He has to move back home with his mom. But he confesses his love to Bernie. And this is where

we get the romance of the film. And we realize that actually that the true love, of Elton's life is Bernie. And he professes his brotherly love to Elton. They're sort of down and out back home at mom's kitchen table. And then Bernie hands Elton something very special. Yeah. He hands him lyrics for what turns out to be your song. And Bernie heads upstairs to, I believe, take a bath or shave or something like that.

And he can hear the piano downstairs. And he can hear this song starting to take. take shape. And so can Elton's mother and her and grandmother who kind of come out of the kitchen to sit and listen as this song begins to grow. And it's really, I think, just sort of one of those goosebumpsy moments that you get in any rocker biopic where you see this talent that you already know exists become what you know it to be today. And this song is really a love song that It sounds as, as the film portrays it as Bernie has written a song because he pens all the lyrics, Elton finds the music and realizes that this is, this is a love song to each other. I want to play it.

It's a little bit funny. This feeling inside. Not one of those who can easily high. So it starts off. That's the part where he's kind of figuring it out. It starts a little mullingale, and it establishes that a really essential musical theme that will reprise itself again. And eventually, the chorus builds, and we hear the exclamation of love. I hope you don't mind that I put down in words.

How wonderful life is while you're in the world. For me, the song has everything you want from Elton, right? You've got that strong melody. You have great harmonic interest, and you've got that chromatic moving bass. It just has everything. It's the quintessential Elton song. I almost feel like the movie could end, half hour, great film, found his love, and we're done, right? That's right.

But then we wouldn't have the addiction narrative to add to it. That's right. We would be missing the entirety of much of the narrative of this film, which is Elton Martin's rise to fame. Because even though he finds love in this song with Bernie, this is also the song that is portrayed as launching his career into the stratosphere. We go on many musical montages into his glam era. We hear the rock and roll and the celebrity take over. Basically, once we leave his house and he becomes this famous person, his addiction starts to set in. And musically, what happens is that we start to hear that opening theme return again and again.

So this is the Yellow Brick Road theme again. If you just had like a few adjectives to describe that little melodic motif, how does it make you feel? It's wistful, it's sad, the longing is there. It's even a little sentimental, I think. But it also is calling back, you know, to a memory of some kind, almost as if he's had memories his whole life of something that will happen in the future. Yeah. As he's moving through his period of great fame, he keeps looking backward. And at all of his worst moments, this theme comes out.

There's a moment where he actually literally comes out to his mother over the phone. Do you remember what she says to him? She says, first of all, that she's always known or she's known a very long time. But then she says, I hope you realize you'll never be loved properly. And it's like someone just kicked him right in the gut. And everyone in the audience, I think so too. And this is something he can't forget his whole life. Thud!

Yeah, you'll never be loved. The thing that he has declared that he wants more than anything, and we get that wistful yellow brick road theme again. And so what is this saying? It's like, oh, he's going down this journey, stored stardom, this golden path, and he's not getting what he wants. And, you know, terribly, the people that he wants to accept him the most

won't accept who he is. The theme song comes back again when Bernie eventually, Bernie leaves him multiple times. His true love decides, you know, at one point I got to go home. Elton is addicted to Coke and is just having a great time on the road. And when Bernie decides to leave, theme song comes back. Elton goes into a nightclub and that is sort of orgiastic. Yet while he's in this scene, all of his earliest memories keep recurring. And yet again, the yet.

Yellow Brick Road theme comes back. And eventually as we, he eventually goes into rehab and we sort of, the film catches back up to where it began. We get the full version of Yellow Brick Road finally. And what we hear in it, at least I do, is a sense of change. I feel like that wistfulness becomes triumph. And he says, like, I finally found. my future life beyond the Yellow Brick Road. He's finally going back home. He's going back to Kansas. And he's admitted himself into the Addiction Treatment Center and is finally, you know, is starting to get

better. I think it's a beautiful moment and sort of a triumph for this piece. But there's, there's sort of one final musical moment that I would be remiss to leave because I was saying there's these sort of two interwoven themes. You have the Yellow Brook Road theme that acts as a sort of like melancholic like heroes journey, light motif that keeps recurring. But so does the Your Song theme. There's one more musical moment that I want to talk about, though, which is his sort of reckoning with all the people that he's done wrong to. And he says, sorry.

When I heard this piece, multiple things were going on in my mind. But the main thing that it made me think of was Mozart. Because Mozart dies very early in life, right? And at the end of Amadeus and the end of his life, it's portrayed that he's working with his enemy, Salieri, to work on his final piece, his Requiem, which will be played at his funeral. And his Requiem is this big, coral, dark, sad piece. And I almost feel like it's being evoked in this Elton piece. Let's hear the Requiem. And here's the Elton John.

What do you think? Am I crazy? No, I think you're right. I mean, I don't know if that was intentional or if Mozart's Requium has just set the template for all of these kinds of moments. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to miss those echoes there. There's another echo, actually, in this piece that I felt was so important and so subtle and worked on all of my heartstrings. At the very end, we get a hint of the theme of the film, which I think finally wins. It seems to be the hardest word. Somebody said that, sir? Yeah. It's super subtle, but the strings get just a little bit of your song.

What's interesting, too, is you can hear hints of your song just in Elton's music, too, over the years, as if, you know, the film is really echoing something that has been living with him for all this time. Oh, yeah. Maybe that's that, he just keeps having to. grammatically descend down his piano chords and we get that in that piece for sure it's a very pianist move it is it is the most pianist move i think you're absolutely right and as somebody who in the film is portrayed as a sort of young classical genius i'm not surprised that he likes to play with all of the possibilities of harmony on the piano you know this film for me just aggressively pulls at my heartstrings

even when it's totally nonsense. Like even when you know it doesn't make any intellectual sense. Like, did you just think, for example, like tiny dancer? Like ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand. What?

It doesn't make any sense. And yet like, I'm like, I'm like crying. It's beautiful. It doesn't make any sense. And what about the seamstress for the band? Yeah, like, what about that seamstress? And you're just like,

the music in some ways is more potent sometimes than the actual meaning of what's going on. And I think that that's what I, got from this film. It's just musically, I was moved, even if it was a story that I already knew or was totally silly. Right. The emotional truth is embedded in the music, which I think is actually very important for the film, since so many of the lyrics are meant to kind of stand in for moments in his life, but he didn't write the lyrics. Bernie did. So the combination of their kind of love

story that's still ongoing and also the fact that sometimes the lyrics don't make any sense, but the meaning is there in the music really, I think, is what makes it tug at your heartstrings so much. And it's also just a really joyful film, which is something that I appreciated. It gets real sad, but it has something at the end that brings joy into the whole story. And I think that is something that people kind of want to see right now. I think you're absolutely right. And that's what we want from Elton. Elton's mission was to kill his original identity, to create this new star, this new name with a middle name Hercules, which is just such a bold choice,

and bring joy to people, make something which is fun, make people dance on a Saturday night, make the early rock and roll, which was when it was fun. And I think he really succeeds in that way. I agree. And I think that the whole thing kind of works

as almost a concept album unto itself, which is kind of wonderful. That's good. I feel like the only other. time we've seen something like that is with maybe with like across the universe, right? Where the Beatles songs all came together to paint the picture of two people in love. Like who knew that there was actually some sort of conspiracy theory built into every single song that was eventually had to turn into this one story?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's an ongoing theme too. I mean, I just saw some previews for the Jagged Little Pill musical that's coming out later this year. And they do something very similar with that album. So maybe all pop music is really just a jukebox musical. I love that alternative universe.

This has been a fun conversation. Alyssa, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been great to do it. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding, and I want to say thank you to Alyssa Wilkinson for joining me as co-host today. We're edited and mixed by Brandon McFarland. Our community manager is Sarah Terry, and Nishat Kerwah and Allison Rocky, our executive producers,

were a production of Vox Media. And I know we say it all the time, but I really mean it. If you have fun musical ideas, please let us know. You can follow us on social media at Switchdown Pop, on Twitter, Instagram, all these places. I guess I'm supposed to say that you can also get this podcast anywhere you get your podcast, which I think you're getting your podcast right now. So I don't know why I keep saying that. We'll have to reconsider that.

Anyway, we'll be back again in a week with a live episode, actually, with Estelle Caswell, who is Vox Media's amazing video director of the Earworm series. It's exceptional. Check it out. And until then, thanks for listening.