Elton John says he’s back with “the kind of album I think that, at my age, I should be making”

One of my older siblings used to play Elton John albums over and over and over during my childhood.

This was during Elton’s 70’s commercial peak and the albums were Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Rock of the Westies, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and his first Greatest Hits album.

Now 66, Elton has a new album out called The Diving Board and he tells Entertainment Weekly that it is a return to even earlier days well before The Lion King and all the rest.

‘I’ve made 40 albums but in all this time, I’ve never put the sound that first made me famous [as a concert act] on any studio record. [Producer T Bone Burnett] was the one who said, “I want to get back to basics” and with him I’ve actually fallen in love with making records again.’

Elton adds that The Diving Board is ‘the kind of album I think that, at my age, I should be making, because it is moving me forward musically. I don’t sit and listen to my old albums. I’m not interested in coasting.’

But back then, he had no problem getting those big selling albums played on the radio.

These days, it’s a different story.

‘It’s frustrating when you don’t get played on the radio,’ he says. ‘Because you have to work much harder to promote tour record, but it’s worth it. We don’t get platinum records and the chart position anymore, but it’s not about that. The world is different and so are we.’