“Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” by Elton John

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road opens with this 1973 two-part monster, and Elton John starts it by imagining his own send-off: "Funeral for a Friend" is the instrumental he dreamed up as the music he'd want played at his funeral. It's a stately, funereal procession of David Hentschel's synthesizer and Elton's piano that swells into a full-band charge, Davey Johnstone's guitar, Dee Murray's bass and Nigel Olsson's drums piling in behind.

The two halves were written separately, but both sit in A, so the band cut them in one long take, sliding into "Love Lies Bleeding" nearly six minutes in. There Bernie Taupin turns a breakup into a crime scene, using images of death to vent pure fury at a lover gone off with another man. Gus Dudgeon produced, and it's glam rock at its most grandly overwrought.

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