Room for New Favorites

Ok so you get a mix today: one song that’s notably more famous than what I typically put on here, and one that’s extremely obscure and it’s just a video of me playing it. Pretty opposite each other, but they are both fairly new to my musical enjoyment/repertoire.

You’ve probably heard of Elton John. He has many songs that could kind of be considered “signature songs” (think “Rocket Man”, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”), but the one I’m gonna put in here is “Tiny Dancer”.

I learned this on piano about a week before leaving home, and have not really played much piano since arriving on piano. It’s a nice addition to my piano songs—when you play piano and sing, usually without other instruments, you end up with a LOT of very slow ballads, so it’s nice that this one has a cool piano riff and some movement. When I’m in an energetic mood, that staccatto playing on the bridge can be really fun. I also love Elton John’s voice in this one, he has this unique kind of warble at the beginning which gives the opening of the song some more intrigue before it really picks up later on. And the vocals on the chorus are deceptively difficult at points; it’s not easy to drop so quickly down an octave like he does on “close-er”, “head-lights”, etc. A lot of Elton John songs are super performable like this one too—can’t both briefly and comprehensively break down exactly what I mean by that, but while playing or listening to it, it’s very easy to imagine yourself as the star of a movie or in some other theatrical setting, and a lot of his songs have that quality to them. Hence the 2019 movie Rocketman.

I remember somebody suggesting a couple of blogs ago that I post myself playing a song at some point, unless I’m imagining that, in which case y’all can suffer through here and I’ll get back to real musicians next blog. This was a complicated upload process so I can’t make this one look nice unfortunately.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vwIa5CSbhnfDwYT3ZPtbT7Mi6_H7BcP3/view

This song is called “Two of Us”, and it’s kind of a deep cut from the album Crisis? What Crisis?, released by my favorite band Supertramp in 1975. Since I’m still getting to know the entire Supertramp catalogue, having just started listening to them a couple of years ago, I still have the pleasure of stumbling across new songs, which is what happened with this one two weeks ago (then I promptly decided to learn it on guitar because it’s GORGEOUS). It’s primarily a creation of Roger Hodgson, who I devoted an entire blogpost to way back, and I’ll go ahead and post his live rendition of it here too because I love that video so much. Between having a soprano sax soloist in the middle section, and playing in a concert hall rather than a dorm room, and being a professional musician, and all that stuff, his version has slightly higher production value than mine. But that’s ok, I love that man, he’s allowed to one-up me. He also dresses a bit like a sophisticated, elderly pirate, so it’s probably a good idea not to mess with him.