I LIke You So Much More When You're Being Bitchy

979. ELTON JOHN, "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore" Produced by Patrick Leonard; written by Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Polygram International 588895 2002 Did not make pop charts

Oh, I have a confession to make. I've never really liked Elton John much. (My sister will kill me.) As you can probably guess by this point, it's not that I don't like sentimentality. I just don't like his kind of sentimentality--or Bernie Taupin's kind of sentimentality--it's so confusing. I'll get to that soon. I don't know. Maybe it's a Brit thing.

In any case, I love this song, in no small measure because it sounds at first blush like a repudiation of everything John and Taupin had done for over thirty years. This leads us into the hall of mirrors, the question of who means what precisely. The video for this song is a striking continuous take of a surprisingly bearable Justin Timberlake as a young Elton wandering backstage at an early 70s arena show where virtually anything a young man could want is offered somewhere, in one of the rooms off that seemingly endless corridor. In this case, song and image blend beautifully, and that makes one think that this song communicates Elton's actual feelings about his past and present.

But then you remember that it's Taupin not John who writes the lyrics. John just writes those chords around the pre-existing words, the same chords that he has freely admitted in interviews he has stolen outright from Anglican Church hymns. These are Taupin's words, but are they words he has chosen to write about John's life?

The key to surviving this song is the bridge, as textbook an example of what a bridge is supposed to do as Tin Pan Alley ever produced. The singer and the lyricist are both running down, and the song is a defense against the exhaustion of age. What they both mean is that this train doesn't want to stop. Whether it will . . . well, that's anybody's guess.