Classical Music, Music Driven

By the autumn of 1967, John (although he was still called Reggie Dwight then) had put music to several of Taupin’s lyrics including “Scarecrow” and “A Dandelion Dies in the Wind” and mailed them to him. Both were folk songs reflecting Taupin’s life growing up on a farm. Eventually Williams brought Taupin to the recording studio where John was doing session work and with the simple words “meet Bernie” ignited one of the longest lasting and most commercially successful partnerships in the music industry.

Perhaps an unconventional pairing, the synergy between John, trained in classical music, and Taupin, a farm boy who nevertheless loved classical poetry by Coleridge and Tennyson, birthed some of the most emotion evoking songs in music history. Taupin was impressed with how much John knew about music; John recognized that Taupin’s lyrics, though sometimes cryptic, had an intriguing, mystical, earthy quality that connected at a deeper emotional level than anything he had written himself. It wasn’t long before Taupin (who soon became the brother John never had) moved into the home where John and his mother still lived. Their brotherhood would provide the foundation for a lifelong collaboration and help them survive strains that might sever other, less personal partnerships.

The team tackled the creative process just as they had on their first collaboration, which would become a hallmark difference between their collaborative team and others in the business. Taupin wrote the lyrics first, then handed them off to John, who wrote the music around them, abandoning the traditional process in which lyrics are written after the music. As a result, the music is lyric driven rather than music driven, and to this day, that is how the team works. “I’m a musical mouthpiece for his lyrics, which I love,” John explained on VH1’s Behind the Music.