BLUE MOVES (1976)
Tonight
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
Tonight,
Do we have to fight again
Tonight?
I just want to go to sleep
Turn out the light
But you want to carry grudges
Oh nine times out of ten
I see the storm approaching
Long before the rain starts falling.
Tonight,
Does it have to be the old thing
Tonight?
Oh, it's late, too late
To chase the rainbow that you're after
I'd like to find a compromise
And place it in your hands
My eyes are blind, my ears can't hear
And I cannot find the time.
Tonight
Just let the curtains close in silence
Tonight
Why not approach with less defiance
The man who'd love to see you smile,
Who'd love to see you smile
Tonight.
One Horse Town
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin/James Newton-Howard)
Saw a Cadillac for the first time yesterday.
I'd always seen horses, buggies, bales of hay.
‘Cos progress here don't move with modern times.
There's nothing to steal.
So there's not a great deal of crime.
It sure is hell living in a one horse town,
There's half a mile of Alabama mud bed ground.
Nothing much doing of an afternoon,
(Unless you're sitting in a rocking chair just picking a tune).
And they ain't too well acquainted with the Stars and Stripes
But if you want to hear Susanna then they'll pick all night
They'll pick all night.
‘Cos it's no dice living in a one horse town,
Laid back, as my old coon hound.
And I just can't wait to get out of this one horse town,
There's nothing to steal ‘cos there's simply nothing much around.
Sure is hell living in this one horse town,
There's half a mile of Alabama mud bed ground.
And I just can't wait to grow out of this one horse town,
There's nothing to steal ‘cos there's nothing much around.
Chameleon
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
The last I heard of you,
You were somewhere on a cruise in the Mediterranean.
So, imagine my surprise to see you very much alive
In the English rain again.
And I can still recall wet afternoons,
When we were small and simply childish.
But you’ve created your own ghost
And the need you have is more than most to hide it.
Oh, Chameleon, you’re stealing your way back into my eyes,
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, you’re a devil, you’re a devil in disguise.
Do you really change me, or am I going crazy?
Chameleon, Chameleon, Chameleon, you’re free again my child.
I remember still those lazy summer days we’d kill out hunting danger,
And we were alien to all outsiders
We had no desire to talk to strangers.
Boogie Pilgrim
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin/Davey Johnstone/Caleb Quaye)
Crime in the streets
I read about it every day in the papers
Justice needs and Justice wants
But just in time’s too late here.
Oh, feels like I wasn’t born there
I feel just like a Boogie Pilgrim.
Boogie Pilgrim
Hustled to get it
To get it together
Boogie Pilgrim - oh
Brother I never felt better.
Low life’s complete
When you’ve lived that way out on the sidewalk
Oh I got the speed if you got the need
But the need in me needs nothing
But I know that you all want something
Oh, just like a Boogie Pilgrim.
Cage The Songbird
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin/Davey Johnstone)
Sober in the morning light
Things look so much different
To how they looked last night.
A pale face pressed to an unmade bed
Like flags of many nations flying high above her head.
The cellophane still on the flowers
The telegram still in her hand
As whispers circulate all day
Their back-stage baby princess passed away.
And you can cage the songbird
But you can’t make her sing,
And you can trap the free bird,
But you’ll have to clip her wings,
‘Cos she’ll soar like a hawk when she flies
But she’ll dive like an eagle when she dies.
Promises of no more lies,
Fell flat upon an empty stage
Before the audience arrived.
A return in time to the cheaper seats
She never knew what lay beneath
Just a dated handbill they found between the sheets.
Let down before the final curtain
A shallow heart that left her cold.
She left in rouge upon the mirror
A circled kiss to the faithful fans who’d miss her.
Crazy Water
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
On a bench, on the beach
Just before the sun had gone,
I tried to reach you
Plain faced and falling fast
You looked so vacant, like an empty shell
Whose life had passed upon the ocean.
Before light shook the sky
Down by the docks I saw
The masts unfolding
Don’t turn away, please understand
It’s a life and a living
And a way to keep the wolves away
From hungry hands, from hungry hands.
Crazy water
Takes my fishing boat on Monday morning
Dangerous dreaming
If we all believe in the things you believe you’re seeing
Oh we’d never drop our nets in the crazy water, crazy water.
Tangled lives, lonely wives
Shoreline widows pray
For the souls of missing whalers
Endless on an endless sea
Where nothing lives between us
Just the breakers on the ocean
Separating you and me,
Separating you and me.
Shoulder Holster
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
Now it was just like Frankie and Johnny
And it was just like Stagger Lee
Dolly Summers was a simple girl
From a mid-west family.
With a stucco home and her own Mustang
And a charge account at Sears,
She had everything that a girl could want
To live happy for the rest of her years.
But the thing that she wanted most of all
Was the thing that she had lost
To the arms of a downtown black jack hustler
By the name of Candyfloss.
They'd slipped town on a late night train
Heading for the West.
Dolly slipped behind the wheel of her Mustang
With a piece between her breasts.
If it seemed just like a movie
Or a night of bad TV
They should have had a picture of Dolly's face
As she drove across the country.
With daggers drawn for her fallen man
And venom in her heart,
It was nearly dawn when she caught them up
Making out in a picnic park.
But the thing that shook her rigid
As she fumbled for her gun
Was the state of the man that she'd married once
And thought of as the only one.
And as she looked back on the chances
That she'd passed up at home,
Well she quietly dumped pistol in a ditch
And she headed home alone.
Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
What have I got to do to make you love me
What have I got to do to make you care
What do I do when lightning strikes me
And I wake to find that you're not there?
What do I do to make you want me
What have I got to do to be heard,
What do I say when it's all over?
And sorry seems to be the hardest word.
It's sad, (so sad)
It's a sad, sad situation
And it's getting more and more absurd,
It's sad, (so sad)
Why can't we talk it over?
Oh it seems to me
That sorry seems to be the hardest word.
What do I do to make you love me
What have I got to do to be heard,
What do I do when lightning strikes me
What have I got to do?
What have I got to do
When sorry seems to be the hardest word?
Between Seventeen And Twenty
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin/Davey Johnstone/Caleb Quaye)
I wonder who’s sleeping in your sheets tonight,
Whose head rests upon the bed
Could it be a close friend I knew so well.
Who seems to be so close to you instead, so close to you instead.
I’m blue tonight, I’m red when I’m mad.
I’m green when I’m jealous, yellow when I’m sad,
I guess I can’t have everything,
So much has flown between the years when
I was twenty oh and you were seventeen.
And if I shower around 3 a.m.
It’s just to wash away
The trace of a love unwanted
Oh in the times I went astray,
The times I went astray.
So out of choice I chose rock and roll
But it pushed me to the limit everyday,
It turned me into a gypsy, kept me away from home
From there on, there seemed no use for you -
For you to stay.
The Wide Eyed And Laughing
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin/Caleb Quaye/James Newton-Howard/Davey Johnstone)
Are you still in control of the boat that you row,
Or do you still cling to me, when it’s sinking?
I never condemned you, I only consoled you
When candlelight made me a King.
For the wide-eyed and laughing
Passed like a season
Erasing a passion to sin,
For no-one knew better than the tealeaves and the tarots
That the wide-eyed and laughing
Were just one step ahead of the wind.
And the hearts that you played on the porch swing for me
Was a song that I'd heard in the past,
For I had an audience somewhere inside you
That applauded whenever you laughed.
Gone is a word that I now rarely use
Though sometime in the course of a day
I go racing back like a man possessed
By the wide-eyed and laughing daughters of some different age.
Someone's Final Song
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
He died when the house was empty,
When the maid had gone.
He put a pen to paper for one final song.
He wrote -
‘Oh babe, it's the only way.
I know it's wrong but I can't stand
To go on living, to go on living, living life this way.
And I don't know what the time is,
Or what the next line is.
Or how you're going to take the news.
But if I had my life again.
I wouldn't change a thing.
I’d let nobody - I’d let nobody
Stand inside my shoes.
Oh something's gotten hold of me,
This home is not the home it used to be.
I've gathered dust like the dying flowers,
And I've drunk myself sober
After hours and hours.
Where's the Shoorah?
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
She grows, she's grown like pampas
Tall in the wind
She's sinful and spiteful,
She's all girl, woman and mother.
She's had my children,
And she's been my lover.
No, she don't like to fight it,
Once you've been bitten
You get excited.
My mama she really likes her,
She comes for coffee,
And my Mama asked me
So where's the Shoorah she sang,
You know I hear it again my friend,
Where's the Shoorah, she came upon it,
Waiting to sing her back
‘Cos she likes to sing about
Where's the Shoorah, she sang,
Over and over and over,
Where's the Shoorah, she sang.
If There's A God In Heaven (What's He Waiting For?)
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin/Davey Johnstone)
Torn from their families,
Mothers go hungry,
To feed their children,
But children go hungry,
There’s so many big men
Out making millions
When poverty’s profits
Just blame the children.
If there’s a God in Heaven
What’s He waiting for?
If He can’t hear the children,
Then He must see the war,
But it seems to me
That He leads his lambs
To the slaughter house
Not the promised land.
Dying for causes
They don’t understand.
We’ve been taking their futures
Right out of their hands.
They need the handouts
To hold back the tears,
There’s so many crying
But so few that hear.
Idol
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
Oh, he was a light star tripping on a high wire
Bulldog stubborn, born uneven, a classless creature, a man for all seasons
But don’t bet them that they can’t take him to the very bottom.
‘Cos they made him and they’ll waste him
And I don’t believe that I want to watch them.
‘Cos the fifties shifted out of gear
He was an idol then, now he’s an idol here
But his face has changed, he’s not the same no more
And I have to say that I like the way his music sounded before.
He was tight-assed
Walking on broken glass
Highly prized in the wallet size
The number one crush in a schoolgirl’s eyes.
But don’t pretend that it won’t end in the depth of your despair
You went from lamé suits right down to tennis shoes,
To peanuts from the lion’s share.
Bite Your Lip (Get Up And Dance!)
(Elton John/Bernie Taupin)
She slid down to the city limits
Monkey time in fifteen minutes
Bite your lip, get up and dance.
Don’t let me down
Please stick around
Bite your lip, get up, get up and dance.
Strobe light on funky feet,
Soul children in the disco heat.
Top dog, top cat,
Move that muscle and shake that fat.
Bite your lip, get up, get up and dance.
Chicago, L.A.
Everyplace, everyway
Bite your lip, get up, get up and dance.
Illinois, Santa Fe,
Do do do do do do do what I say.
Bite your lip, get up, get up and dance.