“Caribou” feels like the rush job it was, with John and his band banging out the basic tracks in a little over a week and then launching a tour of Japan while producer Gus Dudgeon overdubbed horns and backing vocals. The country leanings are most evident in “Turn the Lights Out When You Leave.” It would have been nice to hear George Jones tackle that one. John’s only self-produced album, it is about contentment and where to find it, whether it’s while sitting on a “Porch Swing in Tupelo” or while pondering an “Answer in the Sky” that sounds suspiciously like “Philadelphia Freedom” slowed way down. As such, “Peachtree Road” is a mostly quiet treat. It is more like his Small-Sunday-Morning-Cup-of-Coffee-Thankful-for-the-Little-Things Album. “Peachtree Road” is not John’s Big Dumb Rock Album (that would be “Rock of the Westies” stay tuned). Highlights include the long, rocking title track and the ballad, “Skyline Pigeon,” which was a favorite, years later, of Ryan White, a young man suffering from AIDS who John befriended in the late 1980s.
![elton john album cover songs from the west coast elton john album cover songs from the west coast](https://www.picclickimg.com/d/l400/pict/373829505200_/Elton-John-Songs-from-the-West-Coast.jpg)
Featuring its share of obscure lyrics and knotty music, “Empty Sky” shows John and Taupin making the initial move away from the songs-for-hire they had been writing and toward a more personal style. It was not released in the United States until the height of Eltonmania in 1975. release 1975)Ī portrait of the John/Bernie Taupin songwriting team as very young men, “Empty Sky” was the British debut album and made little impact upon its 1969 release. True to its title, “Blue Moves” is a melancholy set, typified by the only big hit single to emerge from it, “Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word.” In addition to “Sorry,” “Blue Moves” is highlighted by a soaring orchestral ballad, “Tonight” and the atypically hard-rocking “One Horse Town.” Also, fans of Elton oddities might want to check out the instrumental “Out of the Blue,” in which the band stretches out in an Allmanesque kind of way. Jackson Browne had already laid the groundwork for what is now called “emo” music by 1977, but John made his contribution to the oh-so-sensitive genre with “Blue Moves,” the second double album in his discography. In retrospect, “Breaking Hearts” was John’s last decent record before a 15-year period that would include both success - the man won an Oscar during this time, after all - and failure, but would be an era conspicuously lacking any one consistently good John album. “Breaking Hearts,” the follow-up to the critically and commercially successful “comeback” LP, “Too Low For Zero,” was also a hit, led by “Sad Songs (Say So Much).” “Breaking Hearts” isn’t a masterwork, but it’s a decent 1980s-style pop rock album, with rockers (“Restless”) and the by-now patented ballads (“Burning Buildings”). The following list includes the classics, along with a few albums that, while flawed or forgotten, contain moments that rank with Elton John’s best and/or most interesting work.