Video will appear as you scroll through the story
Elton John · S5 E4
Blue Moves
'Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.' A beautiful ballad hiding inside a bloated double album. The public is losing patience
October 1976. Elton John releases Blue Moves, a double album with 18 tracks across four sides of vinyl. It is the sound of a man with too much to say and no one around him willing to say "stop."
Elton John -- Blue Eyes (1982). A tender ballad from six years after Blue Moves, carrying the same fragile melancholy that runs through the double album's best moments. The vulnerability in this vocal is the same voice you hear on "Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word."
The Scope
Blue Moves covers jazz, pop, soul, and almost no rock and roll. David Crosby and Graham Nash sing backing vocals. Toni Tennille drops in. The London Symphony Orchestra, arranged by a 25-year-old James Newton Howard, fills Abbey Road with strings.
“The album contains nowhere near enough good songs to justify the extended length.”
— Rolling Stone, 1976
TAP TO REVEAL: Where did Elton's 25-year-old keyboardist record his first orchestral arrangement?
Abbey Road Studios, London
Where James Newton Howard conducted the London Symphony Orchestra for Blue Moves. The same studio where the Beatles recorded most of their catalog, now hosting a 25-year-old American arranger on his first major orchestral session.
The Single That Saved It
"Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word" goes top ten worldwide and gives the album a hit it desperately needs. The rest of the tracklist is harder to love. Instrumentals drift into each other, ballads pile up, and the raw energy that powered Rock of the Westies is almost entirely gone.
Blue Moves by the Numbers
How many tracks did Elton put on the Blue Moves double album?
Tonight -- Elton John
The nearly eight-minute showpiece of Blue Moves. James Newton Howard conducts the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road, building a sweeping orchestral introduction before Elton's vocal enters. This is the track that proves the ambition behind the album was real, even if the execution was uneven. The same keyboardist who played his first gig at Wembley Stadium a year earlier is now writing for a full orchestra.
Tonight, Elton John (1976)
Bernie Taupin writes about longing and distance, and the orchestra makes every word feel enormous. This is what Blue Moves could have been if the whole album had been this focused. Follow the words as the strings build.
The Underrated Record
Years later, Elton will call Blue Moves "one of our most underrated records." He might have a point. The best tracks are genuinely beautiful. But they're buried under four sides of vinyl that few listeners had the patience to finish.
The album stalls, the reviews sting, and Elton does something nobody sees coming. Next: Wembley 1977, a tearful retirement announcement, and a farewell that lasts exactly two years.
0 XP earned this session