Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long Long Time)

"Rocket Man" uses outer space as the most effective metaphor Bernie Taupin ever found for ordinary alienation — an astronaut phoning home from a trajectory that carries him away from everything that makes him human, his vocation inseparable from his loneliness. Elton John's piano introduction has the quality of a very clear morning: open, slightly cold, containing the possibility of both beauty and desolation. The orchestration by Paul Buckmaster opens gradually, strings entering at the point where the lyric turns inward. John's vocal is among his most controlled and affecting, the deliberate flatness of "burning out his fuse up here alone" landing harder precisely because he resists the temptation to oversell it. Davey Johnstone's guitar solo occupies the bridge with gentle purpose. The song's production sits at the precise historical moment before excess consumed the soft rock world, its restraint giving it a durability that more ostentatious records from the same period forfeited. It resonates longest for people who have chosen a life that places them, at intervals, very far from where they most want to be.