Elton John

Born Reginald Dwight in 1947, Elton John took to the piano as a small boy and won himself a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. Through the '60s he paid his dues the hard way: in the blues band Bluesology, as a session musician, and as a songwriter for hire alongside the lyricist Bernie Taupin, a partnership that has defined him ever since, with Taupin writing the words and Elton setting them to music. Empty Sky, the debut album, came out in 1969.

Then the pace went supersonic. 1970 brought two albums, Elton John and Tumbleweed Connection, along with "Your Song", a tender, plainspoken piano ballad that sounds like it was written at the kitchen table, and the Grammys nominated him for Best New Artist in 1971. Madman Across the Water followed that year, and so did "Tiny Dancer" and "Levon", songs that take their sweet time, building patiently from a lone piano to a full-band swell.

Honky Château arrived in 1972, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in 1973, Caribou in 1974 and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in 1975. 1973 alone delivered the wistful title song of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the strutting glam of "Bennie and the Jets" and "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding", a two-part epic that starts in gloom and ends in a roar. He played it all with a showman's flamboyance and a wardrobe to match, and the aching "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" followed in 1975.

The years that followed were not all glitter. From the late '70s to the late '80s he battled a serious addiction to drugs and alcohol, and he has been sober since 1990. He founded the Elton John AIDS Foundation in 1992, wrote music for The Lion King in 1994, Aida in 2000 and Billy Elliot the Musical in 2005, and went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. The honors piled up from there, from a knighthood in 1998 to the Companion of Honour in 2020, and his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which ran from 2018 to 2023, out-earned every tour that had come before it.

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