10 Best Elton John Songs Of The 1970s

Feature Photo: Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Elton John is one of the most written-about artists on this site, and for those of us who went to high school in the 1970s, there is a simple reason: Elton was our Beatles. From 1970 through about 1977 it seemed like another great album arrived every six months, packed not only with enormous singles but with deep tracks that often meant even more to the fans who lived with those records. Songs like “Bennie and the Jets,” “Rocket Man,” “Honky Cat,” and “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” were everywhere, but the thrill of discovering something like “Ticking,” “Harmony,” or “Blues for Baby and Me” on the album was different. This list reflects that side of Elton’s 1970s catalog—some hits, some deep cuts, and ten songs that still remind us just how extraordinary that run really was.

# 10 – Take Me To The Pilot (Live)

The live “Take Me to the Pilot” from 17-11-70 captures Elton John, Dee Murray, and Nigel Olsson as one of the most exciting three-piece bands of the era. The performance was recorded on November 17, 1970 at A&R Recording Studios in New York City for a live radio broadcast, with a small studio audience packed outside the booth. The album was never originally planned as a commercial live release, but bootlegs of the broadcast became so widespread that the record company eventually issued it officially in 1971. Elton has said he remains enormously proud of the recording, and it is easy to hear why: his piano playing is ferocious, Murray and Olsson move with him instinctively, and a song that was already strong on the 1970 Elton John album becomes something even more powerful onstage.

# 9 – Come Down In Time

“Come Down in Time” is one of the most beautiful songs on 1970’s Tumbleweed Connection, a record filled with American imagery even though Elton John and Bernie Taupin were still young English songwriters looking across the Atlantic. The song moves at an unhurried pace, with Elton’s vocal surrounded by harp, oboe, acoustic guitar, strings, and Paul Buckmaster’s arrangement rather than the harder rock sound heard elsewhere on the album. Taupin’s lyric is built around waiting for someone who may never arrive, and Elton sings it without overselling the heartbreak. It was never one of the big Elton John singles, but that is exactly the point of including it here: “Come Down in Time” is the kind of album track that longtime fans discovered by living with the record.

# 8 – Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters

“Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” remains one of Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s greatest New York songs because Taupin wrote about the city without romanticizing it. The lyric grew out of his first visit to New York, when hearing a gunshot near his hotel window shattered some of the myths he had absorbed about the city and gave him a more complicated picture of the place. Released on 1972’s Honky Château, the track is beautifully restrained, with Elton’s piano and vocal supported by Davey Johnstone and Dee Murray rather than a massive orchestral arrangement. The song’s mixture of disillusionment and gratitude became even more powerful when Elton performed it at the Concert for New York City after the September 11 attacks.

# 7 – Ticking

“Ticking,” the closing track on 1974’s Caribou, is one of the darkest songs Elton John and Bernie Taupin ever recorded. Taupin tells the fictional story of a quiet young man whose life ends in a deadly shooting spree and confrontation with police, while Elton performs the song almost entirely alone at the piano. That stripped-down setting is what makes it so unsettling: there is nowhere for the narrative to hide, and the repeating “ticking” image gives the song a sense of inevitability from the beginning. On an album that also produced huge radio records such as “The Bitch Is Back” and “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” this nearly eight-minute story song showed how far Elton and Taupin were still willing to move away from the obvious commercial path.

Read More: Top 10 Elton John Love Songs

# 6 – Blues For Baby And Me

“Blues for Baby and Me” is one of the great deep tracks on 1973’s Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player. Bernie Taupin turns a Greyhound bus heading west into the escape route for a young couple determined to leave an old life behind, while Elton’s melody carries both the excitement and uncertainty of that decision. Recorded at Château d’Hérouville in France, the track is lifted by Paul Buckmaster’s sweeping string arrangement, which gives the song a cinematic quality without overwhelming the story. It is a perfect example of why so many Elton John fans became attached to the album tracks: buried alongside enormous hits like “Daniel” and “Crocodile Rock” was a song this good that radio barely touched.

# 5 – Harmony

“Harmony” closes Goodbye Yellow Brick Road with exactly the kind of warmth its title promises. Elton John and Bernie Taupin recorded the song at Château d’Hérouville in 1973, and the layered backing vocals give the final moments of that enormous double album an almost communal feeling. In the United States, “Harmony” became the B-side of “Bennie and the Jets” in 1974, while DJM later issued it as a UK A-side in 1980 with “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” on the reverse. It never became the giant standalone hit it might have been if released at the height of the album’s success, but longtime fans never needed a chart position to tell them how good it was. Ending Goodbye Yellow Brick Road with “Harmony” still feels perfect.

# 4 – Cage The Songbird

“Cage the Songbird” is one of the most moving songs on Elton John’s 1976 double album Blue Moves. Bernie Taupin’s lyric was inspired by the death of Édith Piaf, while the music is credited to Elton and Davey Johnstone, giving the song a slightly different songwriting makeup from the classic John-Taupin partnership. Johnstone and Caleb Quaye play acoustic guitars, James Newton Howard adds synthesizer and Mellotron, Ray Cooper supplies delicate percussion, and David Crosby and Graham Nash contribute backing vocals. The whole recording has a hushed, elegiac quality that fits Taupin’s image of a celebrated singer whose public voice could never protect her from private pain.

# 3 – Levon

“Levon” is one of Bernie Taupin’s most fascinating character songs and one of the essential tracks on 1971’s Madman Across the Water. Elton’s piano and Paul Buckmaster’s sweeping orchestral arrangement give the story an enormous emotional scale as Taupin introduces Levon, his father Alvin Tostig, and Levon’s son Jesus without ever explaining every detail. That mystery has always been part of the song’s appeal. Released as a single in the United States, “Levon” reached No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of those Elton John songs that grew even larger in reputation over time. It is strange, melodic, cinematic, and unmistakably from the extraordinary early period when Elton and Bernie seemed capable of creating an entire world inside a single song.

# 2 – Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy

Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy

“Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy” opens Elton John’s 1975 autobiographical masterpiece by introducing Elton as Captain Fantastic and Bernie Taupin as the Brown Dirt Cowboy, looking back at the years when the two young writers were still struggling to find a place in the music business. The title track was recorded at Caribou Ranch on August 8, 1974, with Elton, Nigel Olsson, Dee Murray, Davey Johnstone, and Ray Cooper building the arrangement around piano, guitars, mandolins, bass, drums, and percussion. I always loved the way the lyric presents their partnership as something built through uncertainty rather than instant success. The album later became the first in history to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, but this opening song takes us back to the time when Elton and Bernie had no idea any of that was coming.

# 1 – Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding

“Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding” takes the top spot because nothing else in Elton John’s 1970s catalog opens an album with this much ambition. The basic tracks were recorded at Château d’Hérouville in May 1973, with “Funeral for a Friend” and “Love Lies Bleeding” originally written as separate pieces that fit together naturally in the same key. Elton imagined the instrumental section as the kind of music he might want played at his own funeral, while engineer David Hentschel later built its extraordinary opening at Trident Studios with layers of ARP synthesizer using melodic ideas from elsewhere on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Then “Love Lies Bleeding” explodes into one of the hardest-rocking performances Elton, Davey Johnstone, Dee Murray, and Nigel Olsson ever put on record. Nearly twelve minutes later, the greatest album of Elton’s career has only just begun.

Read More: 10 Best Rocking Elton John Songs