In the music streaming and social media era, conventional wisdom has it that you should ‘skip to the good bit’ as quickly as you can. And this means that long song intros are very much a no no.
It wasn’t always thus, though. There was a time when pop and rock songs - particularly those at the start of albums - could run for an age before the vocals kicked in.
Take Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell, for example, an album opener that kicks off with the ferocity and bombast of the last knockings of a stadium rock show. The vocal embargo lasts almost two minutes.
The Eagles’ Hotel California has a pretty long intro, too; you’ll need to skip to 50 seconds in to hear the start of the first verse.
And then we have Funeral For A Friend/Loves Lies Bleeding, the epic first track from Elton John’s classic Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Don’t expect to hear any singing on this one until almost six minutes in.
It’s this track - and the concept of the long album opener in general - that Elton John and Brandi Carlile are honouring with The Rose Of Laura Nyro, the first track on their new record, Who Believes In Angels?
In a new behind-the-scenes documentary that covers the making of the album, Stories From The Edge Of Creation, we hear them and their other collaborators discussing the making of the song, and its long intro in particular.
“It has that wonderful opening that is sort of the new Funeral For A Friend,” says lyricist Bernie Taupin, with producer Andrew Watt confirming that “that’s where the idea was born”.
“How daring to have a long intro before he’s even singing,” continues Watt. “It’s like psychedelic Mozart.”
“They worked on that intro for three days,” adds Carlile. “That intro is spectacular”. As she hears the song during an album playback, we hear her exclaim that “no one starts an album like that anymore!” and she’s probably right.
Given its title, it comes as no surprise that the song is also a tribute to Laura Nyro, the acclaimed US singer-songwriter who died aged just 49. “[She] was one of my idols in the early ‘70s, and I think she’s been forgotten,” says John.
“We hopefully resurrected her - she was way too sophisticated and way ahead of her time,” adds Taupin. Carlile, meanwhile, confirms that she’d been listening to Laura Nyro in the lead-up to the making of the album because she “knew of her influence on Elton”.
Nyro was known for writing songs with shifts in rhythm in tempo, and The Rose Of Laura Nyro gives a clear nod to this with its own time change. In fact, the Eli’s Comin’ refrain is a direct reference to Nyro’s song of the same name.
And in a final twist, it emerges that there’s even a significance to the day that The Rose Of Laura Nyro was recorded.
“Brandi phoned me that night, after we’d done the track, and said ‘you won’t believe it but it was Laura Nyro’s birthday today.” The universe has its own plan, clearly.
