Songs from the West Coast

Inspired by American singer-songwriter Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker album, Elton John stripped back his music on 2001’s Songs From the West Coast. Crawling out of the soupiness that had marked many of his later recordings, and frequently accompanied by guitarist Davey Johnstone and drummer Nigel Olsson from the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road era, he vowed to “do better.” With three decades gone since those days, the old romanticism has largely been displaced by weariness and topics that he and lyricist Bernie Taupin couldn’t have imagined then. “American Triangle” addresses the gay-bashing murder of Matthew Shepard, one of the album’s dedicatees, and “Ballad of the Boy in the Red Shoes” is a story of AIDS death. Starkest and most striking, though, is “I Want Love,” which seems to be Taupin’s own desolate confession of emotional waste. It’s as complex as anything the pair has ever devised, and proof that something more than showbiz conventions remain behind Elton’s façade.