ELTON JOHN& LAN A DEL REY

you. There’s maybe a little sadness in there, a little melancholia, a little nostalgia. That’s what I love. I love to sit there and cry. If something makes me cry, I feel as if I’m having a good time. Does that sound as if I’m crazy?

LANA No! I mean, I love Leonard Cohen. But I banned myself from listening to people like Elliot Smith, because it’s, just, so much.

ELTON It can be one chord, it can be two chords. But as long as it makes you feel something.

Lana, when did you know you had to be a songwriter?

LANA When I was really young, I always thought I would do it. But then when I got to college, I definitely thought I would not do it. And then, after a year enrolled in business school [ Del Rey went to Fordham], I went back to it.

What happened?

LANA After my freshman year, I read Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. It wasn’t necessarily about money. But he talked about burning every single bridge except for the only bridge that led to your greatest desire. And I thought, “My greatest desire is to sing.” So I switched out and became a philosophy major, because they told me I’d never get a job doing that [ laughs].

ELTON We’ve all heard that one!

LANA So I thought, “Well, then, I’ll have to graduate and be a singer.”

ELTON That’s been the biggest thing in my life, having the hunch. It’s something that comes inside your gut and inside you. A gift from God or whatever you want to call it. When I wanted to leave the band [Elton left Bluesology in 1967], I had to have something concrete to hold on to, but I thought, “I’ll answer this advertisement about singersongwriters.” I’d only written a couple of songs, and I was quite chubby. I didn’t have any selfesteem, but I went because anything was better than playing to people not interested in what you were playing.

And the envelope I picked up [at Liberty Records] — there were so many envelopes, it could have been anybody else’s — was Bernie’s. How weird is that? That’s happened about five or six times in my life, where I’ve had a hunch: “I’ve got to do something.”

LANA What a big testament to shutting one door completely. That was actually going to make me ask you a funny question. Do you meditate?

ELTON I don’t. I’m such a fidgeter, I cannot meditate. David, my husband, meditates all the time.

LANA I’m so ADHD, you’d never know, but I cannot stay still. But my favorite thing is to mix future tripping with inward seeking.

What is future tripping?

LANA Like what [Elton] said, about always looking for the new. I thought it would be cool to combine future tripping with a little meditation. And then, all of a sudden, your finger’s on the pulse of something you didn’t even know was there. And then you put out a record that sounds a lot like other people’s and you’re like, “Oh, wow. They must have been on the same wavelength.” I love that combination. And I was never someone who liked to sit still.

ELTON If you continue with that frame of mind, you will always produce something of substance. And the surprise in life is the greatest element.

LANA And substance to yourself, which I think is the most valuable thing.

ELTON Ten years ago I never thought I’d be saying goodbye on the road. But I didn’t have a family, and I love it more than anything else [ Elton and David Furnish have two sons, Elijah and Zachary, ages six and eight]. I’ve been traveling since I was 16. My life has been so unstructured. If we hadn’t had children, David and I would have been two very wealthy gay guys going around the world, but to what purpose? The purpose now is to make sure that our boys have the best education, the best chance of doing things, and, most of all, they’re filled with love. And that they have fun. Because, boy oh boy, do they give us a lot of fun.

LANA That’s a part of that intuitive knowing. I love how the last page of your book was about, “Well, what am I going to do now? . . . I’m going to be, well, as normal as I can be.” For someone who comes from a chaotic, more eccentric place, I actually think it’s the most beautiful thing you can aim for.

ELTON That’s what life is, so brilliant. If you’re willing to accept that life will change and you roll with it, it will always be brilliant.

Elton, you made clear in “Rocketman” that you had to kill Reginald Dwight to become Elton John. But, Lana, you recently tweeted, “Never had a persona. Never needed one.” What did you mean by that?

LANA That’s what I believe, that I’ve never had one. I believe I wear my hair high, and that’s kind of the end of it for me. I mean, I like to get dressed up and everything, but no one ever said that Elton John was a different person from Reg [Dwight] or whatever. It’s like, just because I wear a babydoll dress onstage or high heels . . . I really don’t need a persona. I’m at the dog park, I’m at Valvoline freaking filling up my own gas tank, and I don’t pretend not to be.

Still, there’s a lot of mystique around you. Unlike most pop stars, nobody knows anything about you.

LANA But it’s not on purpose.

ELTON That’s the best thing to have. Mystique is the greatest thing you could possibly have. People think they know me, but they just talk about the hair, the glasses, the spending. They didn’t know anything about me. I never do interviews anymore. The mystique is so important. Your mystique is your biggest asset. It’s what Prince had. Nobody knew the fuck what Prince was like.

LANA It’s just that my family is still around and close. There’s only so much I could put on the table, coming from where I come from. I’m limited in what I could say in terms of being open. Maybe in 10 years. ELTON Thank you very much. This was so good. LANA I didn’t know you had a show tonight. When I have a show, I can’t hardly see anybody. I’m like a wreck in the morning.

ELTON Oh, I go [to the venue] and have a nap, and then I see everyone [backstage] before the show and get it together, because I don’t want to pace around waiting to go on. Everyone has their own routine. LANA So, are you here [in Los Angeles] for a while? ELTON I leave Friday to go to San Francisco to do a show there, and then I fly to Vancouver. I do another show in San Francisco, and then I’m playing Canada. I do three in Vancouver, two in Saskatoon, two in Edmonton, two in Winnipeg, and then I come back here to promote the book.

LANA That is amazing.

Is it sad to say goodbye to audiences every night?

LANA I like that question!

ELTON [ Shakes head] There are some places you think, “Thank fuck I don’t have to come back here! Yeah! Bye!” I’m not going to say where, though. Oh, my God. No.

LANA I knew you were going to say that.

for them to play “Nights in White Satin”! We were like [ pretends to check watch] ...

ELTON Well, of course they’ve got to leave that until the end. Did you have the songs written before you went in the studio?

LANA I only had one song completely written, Everything else, I think, was done in the studio, which I’ve never done. I think the best stuff was recorded in three weeks.

ELTON You never know. The studio is a complete crapshoot. That’s why it’s important that you had Jack, because you have to have another pair of musical ears. Not just a pair of technical ears. I’ve noticed with all Jack’s productions, you can tell what he’s putting in. I never understand people who fire their producers after one great record. Duffy with Bernard Butler is a perfect example.

LANA Duffy, the blond singer? Where has she

gone?

ELTON Well, she made that first record, which was so great, and then she fired her producer and it all went pear-shaped. You look at all the major acts who [kept] their producers — Springsteen, the Beatles, the Stones, myself. It’s really important. It’s like fashion. Why does fashion have to change every five minutes? It doesn’t. This constant desire for something new.

LANA Thinking about your career, you were playing, first, really, at three years old. So there’s this prodigious element.

ELTON Yeah, but I was playing by ear, just because I loved it.

LANA Yeah, but some people can’t play and sing. I would never play guitar and sing.

ELTON And I’m hopeless at lyrics. People say, “Oh, for God’s sake, you should be able to write lyrics, you’re very verbose, you’re very intelligent.” And it’s a huge insult to people who write lyrics, because I just don’t have it. I love to get Bernie’s written work on the page. I know nothing about what’s coming, and then the story comes and I’m off. It’s like listening to a play on the radio when you’re a kid; your vision comes up in your mind, and it’s just incredible. When you write a song, at that particular moment it’s the best song you’ve ever written. It’s like giving birth to a baby.

LANA I’m the same way, thinking about them as children. If I know there’s an album that people don’t like, I don’t think of myself first. I think, “Oh, I feel bad for the music!”

ELTON Exactly.

LANA When you were finding the melody for “Your Song,” did you know right away that you wanted to pick that melody for the chorus? Do you remember that moment?

ELTON I don’t have a melody until I get a chord. That’s written in E-flat, so I started with the chord in E-flat, and just went. That’s the way it happens with Bernie. It was just a magical connection of chords. And then it all came together, and then you think, “Oh, my God!”

LANA Were your mom and your grandma really in the same house, like in the movie?

ELTON My grandmother wasn’t. My mother was. It was a little apartment. We just had a kitchen, a living room with a piano, and Bernie would write in the bedroom.

LANA That’s cute. In the movie, when you sing, “Yours are the sweetest eyes I’ve ever seen,” did you actually look at Bernie like that?

ELTON Probably. He wasn’t in the room, but . . . LANA But at the time, those were the kindest eyes you had seen.

ELTON Yeah. He was my buddy. He was my brother I never had. We were soulmates. We did everything together. We went to the cinema together, went to the pub, everything together. LANA That is so special.

ELTON It was just the most exciting time. And to actually make it and have someone to share it with was so nice. When I saw the film at Cannes, when he comes into treatment and I’m washing the floor . . . I just lost it. Because he did come to see me in treatment.

LANA It’s interesting in your book when you talk about dropping into Mama Cass Elliot’s party, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Joni, everybody was there. They’re not in the Canyon now, but I just feel such a connection to that singer-songwriter world. And you know, my girlfriends, like Weyes Blood or Zella Day, or [friends] like Father John, or Jonathan Wilson, they’re making album-albums. And a lot of people I hang out with are making longer records. . . . When you were talking about early touring, you would see the Stones having a whiskey somewhere. I see something closer to that here. I was in New York for eight years, but the Strokes were already gone. There wasn’t really a camaraderie. There’s a lot more music here.

I could call a bunch of people and have them come down and play.

ELTON I think the template that you’re talking about — the early Seventies and late Sixties in Los Angeles — the music was so good, you just can’t knock it. I arrived here at the start of stereo music on FM radio. Before that, there was only AM radio, and you heard the same tracks. When FM came out, a lot of radio stations really went out on a limb and you would hear people like Frank Zappa and Hot Rats playing next to Ray Charles and Zeppelin. It was so great because people were experimenting. They were using Ravi Shankar. Miles Davis was getting into funk. Wendy Carlos was doing Switched-On Bach. It was a great time of “anything goes.” To hear it on the radio, instead of having to listen to just pop music all the time, was fucking amazing.

LANA I wanted to ask, do you think there could be another revival of that kind of real togetherness, and community, and something superdifferent, emerging out of rock right now?

ELTON I wish. It would be fantastic. But I don’t think there are the great musicians around that there were in those days. I’m talking about the greats. Also, it’s about the era you were living in, the drugs that were available, the feeling of community, the feeling of love and togetherness. I think that all contributed to it. I think what Pro Tools and everything else did, they took the musicianship away from people, and people made records in their bedrooms instead of with each other in a bar. In Nashville, you don’t see that. You have people playing together all the time. And maybe here too. I do four radio shows a month; I sit down and I listen to all the new stuff they send me, and a lot of it is from people who are writing their first songs in a bedroom. Ninety percent of the time it’s horrible, 10 percent of the time it’s good. It would be much better to get a band. These fucking girls from Nashville, Brandi Carlile or Maren Morris, the Highwomen, these girls are on a mission.

LANA I need to listen to that record.

ELTON These are amazing girls. You, Billie Eilish, Kacey Musgraves — I mean, the girls are leading the way. They’re writing about their life. That’s what moves me. There are very few male singers that move me. Sam Fender is my top pick for the guys.

LANA I love that.

What about L.A. makes it such a great backdrop for evocative music?

LANA I think if I could sum it up in one word, it’s “sun.” It’s perfect every day.

ELTON It’s so lovely to be here [even] in January, and that is very conducive to making music, I think. When I got here, it all made sense. It looks like it sounds.

LANA That’s it!

ELTON But I do like misery. All my favorite songs I’ve written are the saddest songs, probably. I could listen to Leonard Cohen on a loop. Your songs, they’re not miserable songs at all, but they evoke a pathos inside of [ Cont. on 94]

I read a book in college that talked about burning every single bridge except for the one that led to your greatest desire. And I thought, ‘My greatest desire is to sing.’

—L A NA DEL R EY