Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John's seventh studio album, arrived on DJM on 5 October 1973, and it's a glittering double album that barely stops to catch its breath. Gus Dudgeon produced it at the Château d'Hérouville in France, and it wasn't planned as a double at all: John and his band got so fired up by the place that the songs just kept coming, 17 of them in the end.

"Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" is a grand, gloomy overture that turns into a full-tilt rocker, and from there the album goes everywhere: the glam stomp of "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting", the woozy, stuttering strut of "Bennie and the Jets", the wistful, sweeping title song, the tender "Candle in the Wind", and "Harmony", which became a concert favourite. It's pop, it's rock, it's glam and it's piano-bashing showmanship, all in one sequined package.

"Bennie and the Jets" went to number one in America, and the album topped the charts there as well as in Britain, Australia and Canada, where it sat at number one for five weeks. It has sold more than 20 million copies, is widely seen as his crowning achievement, went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003 and was chosen for the National Recording Registry in 2025.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.