An Evening with Elton John and Brandi Carlile (Fuiwell, Global, Stack TV, CBS-TV, filmed March 26, 2025; aired April 6, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Lifetime movie Give Me Back My Daughter on Sunday, April 6 I switched channels for a 90-minute TV concert special featuring Elton John and Brandi Carlile in joint performance at the London Palladium. This was a venue young Reginald Kenneth Dwight (Elton John’s original name – I often joke that he’s the rock star with five first names) frequently attended because it showcased the top American rock acts as well as British stars like The Beatles, but he’d never actually performed there himself before this show. Their collaboration came about when Carlile wrote John a letter offering to record a song with him, and it snowballed from there into an entire album, recorded over a three-week period at Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. With American producer Andrew Watt, they crafted an album with Elton John writing the music and Carlile and John’s longtime collaborator Bernie Taupin doing the lyrics. “The minute she arrived in the studio, I fell in love with her,” John told Jimmy Fallon on a Tonight Show interview. “And I fell in love with her talent, her voice. But more than that, I fell in love with the person. And we’ve become firm friends. We’re like family.” This couldn’t help but remind me of that bizarre message Elon Musk posted about Donald Trump a while back on his social platform “X” (formerly Twitter) in which he said, “I love Donald Trump as much as any straight man can love another man.” I guess in the case of Elton John and Brandi Carlile, they love each other as much as any married Gay man can love a married Lesbian. Most of the program featured Elton John on piano and Brandi Carlile on guitar, with the two sharing vocals and singing a few songs as duets, others as solos from him or her.

I’ve never been that big a fan of Elton John; he emerged just before David Bowie and I had a bit of resentment that John stayed in the closet as long as he did while Bowie came out as Bisexual – and his career suffered from it in the less tolerant early 1970’s. Certainly no one alive in the 1970’s would have guessed that Bowie would end up in a long-term relationship with a woman (his second wife, the supermodel Iman) and John in a long-term relationship with a man (his husband, filmmaker David Furnish). At the same time I remember getting particularly resentful about a PBS-TV documentary about John Denver that proclaimed him the most popular singer-songwriter of the 1970’s. I talked back to the TV and said, “Does the name ‘Elton John’ mean anything to you?” I’ve long thought that what made Elton John a great star wasn’t so much his voice as the sheer quality of his songs; at its best his voice was serviceable, with a nice falsetto (that’s long since deserted him, making some of his biggest hits, like “Rocket Man,” “Tiny Dancer,” and “Bennie and the Jets” – the last two of which he performed here – quite problematical), but it served as a vehicle for some of the finest pop-rock songs ever written. John himself is quite proud of Who Believes in Angels?, the album that came out of the joint three-week sessions with Carlile. On his Web site he’s quoted as saying, “This record was one of the toughest I’ve ever made, but it was also one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. It has given me a place where I know I can move forward. Who Believes In Angels? feels like going into another era and I’m pushing the door open to come into the future. I have everything I’ve done behind me and it’s been brilliant, amazing. But this is the new start for me. As far as I’m concerned, this is the start of my career Mark 2.”

John kicked off the London Palladium telecast with a strong version of “I’m Still Standing,” an anthem to survival and one of the best songs he’s ever written, with Carlile on guitar and backing vocal. Then they did the title song from their new joint album, “Who Believes in Angels?,” as a true duet with some of Carlile’s killer high notes. After that they performed the inevitable “Your Song” – Elton John’s breakthrough hit from 1970 and one of the worst, most sickeningly sentimental pieces of all time and one I can’t help but parody, given that it’s well known that John writes only the music for his songs and relies on someone else for the words (usually Bernie Taupin, though in the late 1970’s he used other lyricists like Gary Osborne, openly Queer “Glad to Be Gay” composer Tom Robinson, and even – on one of his greatest songs, the openly Gay “Flinstone Boy” – himself): “I hope you don’t mind/That my friend Bernie/Really wrote the words.” After that Carlile got two solo numbers of incredible range (both vocal and emotional) and power, “The Joke” and “Swing for the Fences.” They followed that with a version of “Tiny Dancer” on which John croaked an approximation of his original melody, and after that there was an unusual cover at Elton John’s request: Brandi Carlile singing “Crazy,” the all-time country classic the young Willie Nelson wrote and Patsy Cline turned into a mega-hit. Following that John with Carlile’s help did his best with “Bennie and the Jets,” one of John’s greatest songs in its original recording on the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road double LP before he lost the falsetto notes around which he built the song.

Then Carlile gave a bizarre introduction to the song “You Without Me” about the moment in which your children definitively claim their own identities and are no longer your clones. Both Carlile and John proclaimed the joys of parenthood – I’m old enough to remember when most Queer people took pride in the fact that their sexuality relieved them of the potential burdens of motherhood or fatherhood, but Carlile made a curious statement that motherhood was a surprise to her where for most Lesbians it’s well-planned. That made me wonder if, despite her public Lesbian identity, either she, her wife, or both are actually Bisexual. Likewise Elton John said that he’d want the message on his tombstone to proclaim him, not a great singer, piano player or composer, but “a great dad.” They wrapped up the 90-minute time slot with a searing version of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and a new John/Taupin original, a tribute to Little Richard called “Little Richard’s Bible” that centered around the clash between Richard’s true Gay (actually Bi) sexuality and his religious belief that homosexuality was a sin. (Ironically, Little Richard got much of his musical style – including the hammering piano triplets that became his trademark – from Arizona Dranes, the pianist and musical director of the African-American church in Macon, Georgia where Richard’s family, the Pennimans, regularly attended services when Richard was a child. Dranes’s recordings, including the awesome piano instrumental “Crucifixion,” were collected by the Austrian label Document Records and are available for download at https://thedocumentrecordsstore.com/product/arizona-dranes/.) An Evening with Elton John and Brandi Carlile was acceptably directed by Lisa Clare and filmed on March 26, 2025, which meant an amazingly fast 11-day post-production period before the April 6 air date, and it was a welcome program that showcased two great Queer singing stars from radically different generations.