It was the end of the psychedelic era, remember, and the more somber singer-songwriters had their roots in folk and blues. As for the lyrics, their premise - “I’m writing a song about writing a song for you” - has some remote Cole Porter overtones, I guess, but there’s nothing droll or arch about it indeed, if anything, it suffers from over-sincerity. The melody is sturdy, of course, and the chorus is plainly as lovely as can be, but there was something about its formal presentation - coursing strings, a prominent, tasteful bass, a subtle but insistent set of piano fills - that wasn’t registering. In some fundamental way, “Your Song” was unusual. But isn’t it weird that no one - label execs, marketers, or journos - thought it was a single back then, or even notable? For some reason, even experienced music industry people at the time couldn’t “hear” the song. The track, “Your Song,” is a standard today, nearly 50 years on it is one of the most played radio singles of all time, and has been covered by scores of artists, perhaps hundreds. The first words of the song went, “It’s a little bit funny / This feeling inside …”Ī few months later, in early 1971, nearly a year after the release of the album, the B-side was a top-ten hit both in the U.S. The B-side was a forlorn-sounding piano-based track. Late in the year, some radio DJs checked out the B-side of the “Pilot” single, which was a throwaway track from the Elton John album. That’s when something interesting happened. And by this time, John had finished a third album, Tumbleweed Connection, which was released that October. The shy boy behind the scenes found a raucous personality on stage he and a small band had flown to America and had wowed the industry with a cacophonous six-night stand at the famous Troubadour nightclub in L.A. The label went back to the album, poked around some more, and made a third try, with “Take Me to the Pilot.”īy this time, other things were going on in John’s career. That release, “Rock and Roll Madonna,” went nowhere, either. The label’s next move, for some reason, was to dig out a non-album track and release it as the second single, hoping to garner more attention that way. The first single from Elton John, “Border Song,” was a flop. Today, we know Elton John as a lasting and flamboyant star put that aside for right now and remember that back then, no one was thinking in those terms about the plainly talented but pudgy and somewhat morose 22-year-old they were working with at the time. His label, supportive of him in fits and starts, eventually laid out for a decent producer and some lush orchestrations for his second album, which was self-titled and came out that spring. John’s first album, Empty Sky, had been released in the U.K. There’s an incident from early on in Elton John’s career that reminds us how peculiar it has been. Photo: Jack Robinson/Condé Nast via Getty Images