Without Bernie Taupin‘s lyrics, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, The Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water, Captain Fantastic & The Brown Dirt Cowboy, and virtually the entire rest of the Elton John catalog would not exist. That’s why Elton literally handed him his Rock & Roll Hall of Fame statue when he was inducted in 1994, and personally welcomed him into the institution in 2023.
But throughout much of this time, the lyricist has also maintained a solo career that’s flown so far under the radar that many Elton John fans are unaware that Taupin’s own work even exists. And it hasn’t, in any meaningful way, since he disbanded his group Farm Dogs in 1998. His last solo album was 1987’s Tribe. Over the last couple of decades, he’s focused largely on his family, and his work with Elton John.
That’ll finally change Oct. 23 when he releases the stunning new album The Sea Has No Mercy, which he recorded in Nashville with producer Frank Liddell, guitarist Adam Wright, bassist Glenn Worf, and keyboardist Michael Rojas. There are also guest appearances by Brandi Carlile, Lee Ann Womack, the Jeremy Jordan Ensemble, percussionist Jay Bellerose, violinist Scarlet Rivera, and Taupin’s daughter, Georgey.
“With age comes wisdom, which is a natural progression,” Taupin tells Rolling Stone. “I don’t regret any of the records I’ve made in the past. They all had a point at the time they were made. But this is the most satisfying record I’ve ever made. I’m talking about in my own canon, not with the Elton thing, because that’s a completely different ballpark…I wanted to be able to express my own feelings on my own level in my own writing. That’s what makes it more important than anything else I’ve ever done.”
To learn much more about the album, and details of the upcoming documentary about his life, the next Elton John album, and why they have no plans to sell their publishing, we hopped on a Zoom with Taupin.
I want to start by going through the history of your solo work, since it’s really interesting, and rarely discussed. It began with Taupin in 1971. Can you tell me about that one?
That wasn’t really my idea. In fact, I was slightly pressured into doing that by Dick James, who was very instrumental in our early years. He felt that if there was some sort of interest and success in Elton’s first records, that there might be some interest in me doing something in my own right.
And let’s just say my reminiscence of it is pretty cloudy because it was a long time ago, and I was extremely naive as far as studios were concerned. I was very much riding in the saddle of the guys that were familiar with the studio, and the musicians that were available at the time. And it was an incredibly interesting assortment of musicians, everybody from people like [sitar and guitar player] Shawn Phillips, who I’m sure nobody knows about these days, but was quite an influential guy back then. And then obviously [guitarists] Caleb Quaye, David Johnston.
I just basically took a lot of things that I was writing at the time. Obviously, I hadn’t found a singing voice at that point, and I certainly would have been way too intimidated. As I say, I was still very, very naive and green and novice in every aspect of recording. So I just went along with it. I don’t think it was necessarily a good idea. I mean, who at that particular point in time wanted to hear a narrated album of esoteric poetry? But it was an interesting time.
Elton got more and more successful after that, but you didn’t make another solo record in the 1970s. Were you not interested?
It wasn’t something that struck me as being important. I did it when the moment struck, that I felt like I had something to say or I wanted to do something. Unfortunately, I think in some cases it took place at a time when I was probably bored and there was nothing else going on.
Your next album was 1980’s He Who Rides the Tiger.
I felt that album was interesting, and lyrically, it was a decent achievement. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel melodically the connection between myself and the people that worked on it was… It’s hard to think about that because I don’t go back and listen to those records. I remember when it came out, it got quite well received, but again, it didn’t really do anything.
Tribe came out next. That was 1987.
There was a guy at RCA called Paul Atkinson who was the A&R guy there, who was the original bass player for the Zombies who sadly passed away a little time after he signed me. But he encouraged me to make a record that was very indicative of the time period. And I worked with a guy called Martin Page, who was a very good commercial songwriter, and a good producer, a good musician.
In retrospect, I think I was just… Once again, it’s like the poetry album in 1971. I was being motivated by forces around me to do things that were apparent for that particular point in time. Things that went hand in hand with the kind of music. I mean, basically, the Tribe album was a rock pop attempt at making a commercial record, and I was happy with it at the time.
I mean, you exist in the time period you’re living in at the moment, and you just go with the flow. And it’s interesting because all of these records that I made didn’t really do much as far as radio was concerned. I never got picked up by radio. I mean, maybe if XM or Sirius or that kind of thing had existed at that point in time, they might have made a little bit more of a mark. But I have no regrets as far as those are concerned.
You didn’t do anything after that until you formed Farm Dogs in 1996, and put out two albums with them.
That was the first time I started making the kind of music that I really wanted to make. But that had a lot to do with me sinking into a democratic situation that was more comforting and more embracing. The unfortunate thing is that I realized in the end that democracy is great if everybody does what they’re told. [Laughs] So I think that’s what put the final nail in the coffin of Farm Dogs.
You actually toured with Farm Dogs. That was the first time you’d done any concerts of any sort, right?
Yeah. It was a pretty interesting situation because I never ever imagined putting myself in that position to perform live with my own band or with a group of musicians who, as I say, were a democratic organization. But it was fun. I’ll tell you what, the best thing about Farm Dogs was that it really taught me a lot of things that were fairly frightening to me, certainly performing live. But I definitely found my voice in Farm Dogs.
When I did the Tribe album, I actually took voice lessons. I really, really worked on my vocals, but I don’t think in the end they were my true identity. I don’t think there was the real me. I think it was me becoming an AM/FM product of what other people wanted me to be as opposed to what I wanted to be.
I think Farm Dogs, because it was done in a much more back to the roots, back to country, recorded in a home studio surrounded by people that were very encouraging, I think that really gave me my insight on how I wanted ultimately to be as a performer, as a singer, and gave me also more of an intuitive belief in the fact that ultimately I could just actually write my own songs.
So how did you feel to walk onstage at the Troubadour with the spotlight on you as a singer for once? I’m sure that was surreal.
Actually, it wasn’t as intimidating as I imagined it might be. I didn’t get that nervous because there was a great camaraderie in that band. I mean, a lot of people might look on it as a midlife crisis band, which possibly it was, but we had a lot of fun and there was a great, great sense of camaraderie. And that I think made me shed any kind of fears that I had because I knew that if I made mistakes onstage, those guys would pick up the slack.
So Farm Dogs ends in 1998. Why did 28 years pass before your next solo project? Do you think that you were done with making your own music for a long time there?
Yeah, I did for a period of time. There was so much else going on in my life. Changes were being made personally, socially, musically, productively. And I think what happened ultimately is that it became a trifecta of things.
But when I wrote my memoir [Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me], it really put me on the couch. It made me reflective. It was cathartic. I had to look back. I had to try and remember things that I thought I had no concept of recalling. And it really was like being on the couch, being probed, being pushed into remembering things. And along with that, at the same time, we were beginning to make the documentary. And along with the documentary, you get prodded into recall again. You were asked questions about the past, you visit the places from the past, you physically visit them.
How did the documentary lead into the album?
We thought that it might be a good idea to do something for the closing credits, maybe write a song or do something really out of the ordinary, not using a standard Elton-Bernie song, but to actually physically do something in my own writer game. And I actually wrote a song called “That Was Me,” which funnily enough is actually not on the record because I felt it didn’t fit with the record.
But it was part and parcel of things that I began working on and writing. And I found myself just coming up with all of these ideas. In the long run, the album became a manifesto of somebody who’s 76 years old looking back, reflecting, and just a little bit pissed off at the world.
I suddenly realized I had all of these songs in my head and I was writing them myself, “three chords and the truth,” if you will. And I went to New York and had a meeting there with my good friend, [producer] Frank Liddell. We actually joked prior to that: “If I ever wanted to make an album, would you be interested in making an album with me?” And he was like, “Anytime you want, let’s do it. I’m ready whenever you are. I would love to do it.” We had no idea what we meant by making this pact. But when we actually sat down in New York, we talked about the songs. I gave him a bunch of things that I’d written. I said, “Look at these on the plane going home. See what you think.”
Where did it go from there?
He was fired up. He just said, “Come to Nashville. We’ll do it in the house.” And he put together these guys, Glenn Worf and Michael Rojas and Adam Wright. I called them the Tennessee Stonecutters because they basically were the architects. I would sing them the songs, but they would do the arrangements. We did everything in Frank’s house.
It was the most wonderful time I’ve ever had making a record because I was saying everything I wanted to say. And as I say, for the most part, it’s a record that I could only make now. I mean, it’s a reflective record. I’ve been asked by people, “Well, why didn’t you make this record years ago?” And I said, “Because I wasn’t 76 years old 20 years ago.”
Do you write differently if you know the lyrics are for you and not another writer?
Well, absolutely. That’s an incredibly insightful question because it’s very, very important to me. The one thing I realized about making this record, which is entirely different than anything I’ve done before, is the fact that I wrote the songs myself. If I had farmed these lyrics out to other people to put melodies to, it would never have been as cohesive. It would never have had the rhythm it had, and it wouldn’t have had the personal input that I feel so strongly about these songs. They wouldn’t have belonged to me if they’d been co-written.
Your singing voice has a lot more depth and gravitas to it now than it did when you were younger. I kept thinking about Leonard Cohen when I heard the record since the same thing happened to his voice. It actually improved as he aged, even though it was degraded.
Absolutely. And invoking Leonard Cohen there, you have one of the people that I really invoked when I made this album. There were people like Tom Waits, Dylan, Leonard Cohen, John Prine in “Elephant Boy.” These are the guys that are not known as singers. I shouldn’t say John Prine, but Cohen and Waits. They have a very distinctive style. Dylan. There’s Dylan in “Old Church Road.” There’s Leonard Cohen in several songs on there. And there’s nothing wrong with being the bastard son of all these people.
I want to go through the songs here. It begins with “The Fisherman.” You sing, “I was just a fisherman, one broken life on hold/I was just a derelict many centuries ago.” Is this autobiographical?
Absolutely. Well, there’s parts of me in there. That song is, if you’re going biblical, it’s basically John 21. And that comes from my own faith. I’m not afraid of that. Again, going back to Leonard Cohen, I wanted the start of the album to be a commitment, a bit like Cohen did with “Bird on a Wire.” I wanted that to be my “Bird on a Wire.”
And it was an important song to me. The funny thing is that I really programmed the record. I knew exactly the way I wanted the songs to follow each other on the record.
“Old Church Road” is next. “I’ve played with princes, I’ve seen the world/Beat the Devil once or twice.”
Pretty much every song, every line, every lyric on this record has something to do with my past, present, and possible future, with the exception of probably “Old Dog,” which is me falling back into my cinematic storytelling mode. But for the most part, everything else on that record means something. I mean, Church Road was the road I grew up on, in a small village in Lincolnshire. I spent most of my life there before I went to London.
Lee Ann Womack is on the track.
Lee Ann Womack is Frank Liddell’s wife. So it made perfect sense. It was very much a family-oriented record because Anna Lise, who is Frank and Lee Ann’s daughter, engineered and mixed the record and did an absolutely extraordinary job, I think.
“The Sea Has No Mercy” is the title track. It has a real melancholy mood to it.
It’s reflective. It’s about the mistakes you make in the past. And the reason the album is called The Sea Has No Mercy, and that title track is “The Sea Has No Mercy,” is because what I say in that song is 100 percent true. I mean, I am absolutely terrified of the sea. I think the sea is the most powerful force on earth. And you can have your earthquakes and fires and whatever other natural disasters we deal with on a day-to-day basis geographically, but there is nothing as intimidating as the open sea. It just frightens the shit out of me.
Is “Elephant Boy” a reference to the 1937 movie?
No. It’s more about a reference to The Elephant Man, the David Lynch movie. But I used Elephant Boy as opposed to Elephant Man. It just sang better. And the whole idea of that is it’s quite simple. And if I wasn’t me, I’d be somebody else. But then luckily I wasn’t the Elephant Boy. I could have been all of these other things and I wouldn’t have minded so much, but I got away from that one. I mean, the first three songs on the album are fairly intense, so I wanted to lighten it up. And that’s the one track that has a little bit of tongue-in-cheek to it.
On “Ghosts of Greater Men” you sing, “Feel like a timepiece that froze around noon/The year that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.” You feel frozen in 1969?
Well, I think we’re frozen at certain points in our life where we freeze and reflect. And I think 1969 was an extraordinary time for not only us and myself and Elton where we were about to take that big step and the correlation between that and Neil Armstrong making that step onto the moon. We were stepping into the arena. We were about to come to the United States, and that was going to be a big change in our lives. So that’s the metaphor in those two lines.
On that song you also sing, “I don’t want to live through Antietam again.” I know you’re a Civil War buff. What did you mean by that line?
I couldn’t not do that. That is a metaphor for not wanting to go through the pain of the past and just using the battlefield as your own battlefield, if you will.
The bloodiest of all battlefields.
Well, it’s the bloodiest day in American history. So it may be a little over the top to compare your own problems and your own deceits and what have you with Antietam. But again, I’m a writer, so I’m allowed to do that.
“Joker” begins with a shot at Joe Kennedy Sr. for his association with the Nazis. “Well, I never drank the Kool-Aid of the Kennedys/No sir, no sir, no sir/When Daddy Joe kissed up to the enemy/The sins of the father stained the world.”
That whole song is just me grouching and not falling into listening to the wrong voices. I’m not a fan of the Kennedys. I think they’re the most overrated dynasty in American history.
I think a lot of people agree with you on that right now.
It’s just me being a cranky old man and saying — again, I’m 76, I’m allowed to say this shit now.
“Joker” also has a real Tom Waits vibe to it.
Oh, absolutely. Heart Attack and Vine. Frank Liddell, after we cut it, said, “This is a song that might get you committed.” But I just told them to get as weird as they possibly could on that track.
“Come on California” features vocals by Brandi Carlile. What made this song feel right for her?
The California reference is a tip of the hat to Joni [Mitchell]. And Brandi is a consort of Joni’s, and also an absolute dear friend of mine — I refer to her as my little sister. She said, “I’d love to be on the record.” And that to me was the one song that I thought she could do the best work on. And when she took it, she literally sang every single line and said, “Just use what you want to use.” I actually wanted to try and ask Joni to sing on the end and sing a reference from “California,” but I didn’t have the guts to do it in the end. But that’s the one straight-ahead kind of love song to my wife on the album.
“The Favor” seems like a very personal song about something that happened in New York City.
That, again, is a very, very Leonard Cohen song. In fact, I tried to do Leonard Cohen vocals right on the beginning where it’s semi-spoken. I had to get as deep in a register as I possibly could for that one.
There’s a definite story to that. Not personally, but on a metaphysical level. It’s literally about making your choices between good and evil. They both come in. It’s like Bob Dylan said, “Sometimes Satan comes as a man in peace.” It’s the same thing. You can get tricked in many ways, but in the end, you have to make up your own mind. It’s easy to be tempted by two different factions. And again, you got to make up your own mind.
Violinist Scarlet Rivera plays on “Old Dog.” I haven’t heard her on many albums besides Bob Dylan’s Desire, of course. How did she wind up on this?
I was absolutely adamant that we use her. When I do another record, I’m going to have her on way more of it. She is such a cool, cool individual. She was amazing. She played viola on it too. The thing I love about her style is she don’t play fiddle, man. She plays electric violin. And there’s a big difference between playing fiddle and violin, but playing it in her style, and nobody plays like her.
Your daughter Georgey sings on “100 Ways.”
It would’ve been ridiculous to have anybody else singing that because I’m singing to my daughters. And to have another female voice that isn’t my offspring doing it would’ve been pointless.
She’s a great singer. Is she trained?
She actually takes voice lessons with the same coach who teaches Lee Ann Womack. In fact, Lee Ann was the one that turned her onto her. So she’s very artistic. She dances, sings, so I got lucky there.
It’s the last song, and it ends very suddenly. I thought at first the file froze.
Well, originally it had a tail end to it and I said, “No, it’s got to stop completely dead because that’s what the point of the song is.” It may be morbid, but it’s realistic and I think idealistic at the same time. Fatalistic, moralistic, whatever you want to call it, but it’s all of those things.
What’s great about this record is you clearly didn’t make it with any commercial considerations. You don’t need to make a record to pay the rent.
No. Good Lord, no. Absolutely not. Did I make this record for myself? Of course I made this record for myself, but I think I made it for the people around me, the people that have lived in these stories, the people that have affected me, the people that have inspired me, the artists that have inspired me. Like we’ve talked about, you see references to people that I admire in these songs, and it’s a tip of the hat to them.
At the same time, just bottom line is I had so much fun doing it. I would fly in and out of Nashville from L.A. I’d spend a week there and we would record, and it was just such an inspiring, wonderful, fun time.
Are you thinking about booking some small venues and playing any of this music live?
I’ve already been asked to do several things, but we’re not ready to do that right now. I wouldn’t want to do it yet. Let’s see how the record goes, how it’s picked up, how people appreciate it. It’s certainly not off the cards by any means. I mean, if I could work with the foundation of guys that helped me make this record, I would definitely consider it, but not right now. There’s too much coming up. We’ve got the documentary coming out, which is going to probably premiere in January theatrically. So that’s a big, “We’ll see.”
So the documentary is coming out a few months after the album?
Initially, there was talk about trying to get them to come out at the same time, which may have been advantageous. But in doing our research, it’s really not a necessity. So I did the book, which I was extremely proud of and did really, really well. I mean, it was a New York Times bestseller and a Times bestseller in the U.K. also. So it was a natural progression.
I was so proud of the book. And the documentary was tough to get me to do because I’m not really somebody who aspires to that kind of being put under the microscope in that way. But it’s pretty good. And I love the fact that Gary Oldman was the executive producer.
Does the documentary go through your entire life, cradle to now?
I think you’ll have to wait and see on that one. The final cut is just being done as we speak.
You and Elton are on an increasingly tiny list of major artists who haven’t sold their publishing at this point. Are you tempted?
Nothing right now. Not really interested. No point. Why would I?
To make a lot of money.
We don’t need the money. We both have offspring, and why don’t we leave it up to them?
I’ve seen a lot of people say the exact opposite. They said they sold it now so their kids don’t have to manage it, and possibly wind up fighting over it.
Well, that’s their prerogative. And again, when I say that, it doesn’t mean that they literally have to deal with that themselves. There are lots of people who can aid them and help them in those kinds of situations. And who knows if it’s going to change tomorrow, but I don’t know why those people are selling the catalogs. I mean, it’s clichéd, but it is a bit like selling your children, isn’t it?
Paul Simon has expressed some regret over it.
Oh, I’m sure he is not the only one too.
It means you never have to turn on the TV and be surprised that “Tiny Dancer” is being used to sell dish soap or something.
[Laughs] Well, I’m not particularly precious like that. I’ve seen songs of ours used in commercials, but then they’re usually songs that are offshoots anyway, so it doesn’t bother me. I’m not precious in that respect.
But that’s your choice, not someone else’s choice.
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. No, I still get reams of emails every day saying, “Will you okay this to be used in this? Okay this song to be used in that?” And it’s usually, “Yeah, fine, no problem.” But yeah, it’s a moot point. I mean, if we were incredibly greedy and we just wanted to make billions of dollars, which we probably could if we sold it, what’s the point? We don’t need to. I’m comfortable, man.
I think that’s great. You guys wrote those songs, the two of you, nobody else. Why should anyone else own them?
Yeah, it’s really not come up in any conversation. David [Furnish], who’s Elton’s manager, and [my wife] Heather, who’s my manager, they’ve had multiple conversations and it’s just, “Nah, not necessary. Why?”
I’ve heard Elton is working on his next solo record. What’s the status of that?
Well, he’s got a record coming out, I think, at the beginning of next year that I contributed to. But I literally don’t know when that is. He did it with Andrew Watt again. And he wrote it in a completely different way simply because of his eyesight problem. He can’t read lyrics if they’re on the piano. So he basically came up with instrumental tracks and threw basically three or four of them at me and said, “Can you do something with these?” Which I contributed to. But he’s also worked with a couple of other people on there, which is great. So it’s a whole different ballgame for him.
Are you still hoping he’ll do that deep cuts residency he’s been talking about for years?
Yeah, that would be nice. We haven’t discussed it. I know he’s doing these couple of shows in Mexico to make up for the fact that he couldn’t do them during the pandemic, but I don’t know if there’s any talk of a residency thing. It hasn’t reached my airwaves yet.
Are you thinking about your next solo record?
Oh, I’m always thinking ahead. I definitely don’t look back. I’m always, always looking ahead. And I have so much fun doing this, man. You think I don’t want to do it again?
So no regrets that you didn’t do this 20 years ago?
No, I’m glad I did it now. I think if and when I make another record, it won’t be so reflective. I think I might go back to storytelling. In fact, I’ve already written five or six songs that I’ve been playing around with and going back and forth with. So I’m really enjoying the process of working in my own head with myself and nobody else.
