Skip to main content

Elton John Takes Us Through the Creative Process of His Early Hit “Tiny Dancer” (1970)

We all have our favorites from Elton John’s vast catalog, and I’ll admit that 1970’s "Tiny Dancer" has never been one of mine.

Call me crass, but I tend to get it confused with 1973's "Candle in the Wind," which John retooled so swiftly for Princess Diana’s 1997 funeral.

But then Sir Elton—or “Reg” as close friends and long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin call the artist formerly known as Reginald Kenneth Dwight—has always had a knack for working quickly, as Taupin explains above.



I’d never been curious enough to investigate, but assumed, correctly, that the lyric “seamstress for the band” referred to an actual person.

John actually seems a bit blasé, explaining that it’s about Taupin’s then girlfriend and eventual first wife, Maxine Feibelman, whom I must thank for inadvertently supplying the title of my favorite track, "The Bitch is Back," which was her code phrase for “Elton’s in a mood.”

As per Sir Elton, "Tiny Dancer"’s lyrics informed the sound, which is more ballerina than pirate smile.

And while the original liner notes’ dedication suggests that "Tiny Dancer" is indeed a tribute to Feibelman, three wives later, Taupin revised things a bit, telling author Gavin Edwards:

We came to California in the fall of 1970, and sunshine radiated from the populace. I was trying to capture the spirit of that time, encapsulated by the women we met—especially at the clothes stores up and down the Strip in L.A. They were free spirits, sexy in hiphuggers and lacy blouses, and very ethereal, the way they moved. So different from what I'd been used to in England. And they all wanted to sew patches on your jeans. They'd mother you and sleep with you—it was the perfect Oedipal complex.

Writer-director Cameron Crowe must’ve absorbed that message, to go by his memorable use of the song in Almost Famous’ tour bus scene,

Those communal good vibes permeate director Max Weiland’s winning entry in a recent John-sponsored contest on The Cut, which, like the opening scene of La La Land, gets a lot of mileage from LA’s reputation for traffic jams.

Can ticket buyers expect to find the song featured prominently in the just released John biopic, Rocketman?

No.

(Just kidding. Why else would John and his Rocketman doppelgänger, actor Taron Egerton choose that one for a duet at John’s annual Oscar party?)

Related Content:

A New Christmas Commercial Takes You on a Sentimental Journey Through Elton John’s Rich Musical Life

Elton John Sings His Classic Hit ‘Your Song’ Through the Years

Elton John Proves He Can Turn any Text into a Song: Watch Him Improvise with Lines from Henrik Ibsen’s Play, Peer Gynt

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this June for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Elton John Takes Us Through the Creative Process of His Early Hit “Tiny Dancer” (1970) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture http://bit.ly/316PagC
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more