The Meaning of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’

By Oliver Tearle

A question that can always be guaranteed to send music buffs into furious and passionate arguments is: who is the greatest songwriter in all of pop music? Would it be a team of writers, such as Lennon-McCartney, Goffin-King, or Morrissey-Marr? Or a lone talent like Prince, Bob Dylan, or Joni Mitchell?

Or would it even be one of those figures more familiar from track listings on record labels (for those of you with false teeth and Zimmer frames, like your poor beleaguered blogger, who are old enough to remember 7” singles) than from appearances on Top of the Pops?

Many of the most successful and prolific songwriters work behind the scenes. Who could pick any of Motown powerhouse Holland-Dozier-Holland out in a lineup? I mean, two of them even had the same name, for goodness’ sake. I like to think that, when they attended Motown board meetings, they preferred to sit at opposite ends of the boardroom table and insisted that they always be referred to as, respectively, ‘North Holland’ and ‘South Holland’.

One name which should definitely be on this second list – the behind-the-scenes, virtually invisible geniuses of songwriting – is Bernie Taupin. As well as co-writing high-powered 80s classics ‘These Dreams’ (Heart) and ‘We Built This City’ (Starship), Taupin is also famously the long-standing songwriting partner of Elton John, penning the lyrics for the majority of Elton’s biggest hits. Everyone knows what Elton looks like (or the various Eltons we’ve been treated to over the years), but who could be shown a picture of his best-known and closest collaborator and go, ‘Oh, that’s Bernie’?

Of all of the songs he co-wrote with Elton John, none is more personal than ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’. Indeed, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ is Bernie Taupin’s song, lyrically speaking: not just because he wrote the lyrics but because the song is deeply autobiographical in many aspects. Elton may sing the words, but those words are Bernie Taupin’s, and they’re rooted in his own life and his feelings about fame.

Some songs are love letters to somebody. ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ is a fallen-out-of-love letter, but who was the intended recipient? High society? The music industry? A specific artist or musician? Perhaps even Elton himself? Did Taupin and Elton have a falling out?

Taupin’s lyrics certainly contain many autobiographical elements, including allusions to his childhood on a Lincolnshire farm. In 2014, Taupin himself remarked that the song is about wanting to leave the land of Oz and get back to the farm: a desire that he called his ‘escape hatch’.

However, he has also said that he doesn’t think the song was about turning his back on success, a view which he has branded ‘naïve’. Instead, the song was about the search for ‘a happy medium way to exist successfully in a more tranquil setting’.

And in any case, bidding farewell to the Yellow Brick Road is hardly a retreat to some simple and beautiful paradise. After all, absenting oneself from society in favour of the land of the howling old owl in the woods and the horny back toad doesn’t exactly sound like Eden. And there’s work – ploughing and hunting (that horny toad again) – and you didn’t have to do that in Eden.

The point, though, is that owls and toads are real, whereas the Yellow Brick Road leads to the unreal: fame, riches, and the fakeries of the hangers-on and the fair-weather friends. If Marianne Moore thought poetry was ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’, Taupin is acknowledging that those ‘real toads’ are a world away from the ‘imaginary’ Eden of a land of fame and fortune.

There’s no evidence that Taupin was addressing this song to Elton John, or telling his songwriting partner that he wanted to give up on music and go and live in the country doing actual farming. Limiting the song to some sort of imagined spat between Taupin and John reduces the song to the personal level and restricts its scope and significance.

And in fact, the song’s message is far more universal than this. Taupin’s clever choice of the Yellow Brick Road as the song’s central image lends the song’s meaning a mythic aspect, immediately taking us out of this world and into the realm of fantasy and imaginative literature.

The Yellow Brick Road – or, less memorably, ‘the one paved with yellow bricks’ in the novel’s first edition of 1900 – originally appeared in print in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the basis for the famous 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland as Dorothy (this was actually the eighth cinematic adaptation of the book, but it’s the one everyone knows). In the book and the film, the Yellow Brick Road leads to the imperial capital of Oz, otherwise known as the Emerald City.

Taupin – or the speaker of the song’s lyrics, at any rate – doesn’t want to pursue this golden road to the land of riches and emeralds: he wants to get out and go home. What’s odd, though, is that in the book and the film, Dorothy is only searching for the road so she can find her way back home: the very thing the singer in ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ wants to do, too. (She has to go to Oz so she can ask the titular Wizard for his help in sending her home.)

And the twist in the book (and film) is that Dorothy had what she needed all along: she didn’t need Oz, or the Yellow Brick Road, after all. I guess in the end all roads lead to home, rather than Rome.

Remarkably, the double album to which ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ lent its name was recorded in France (at the Château d’Hérouville near Pontoise) in just two weeks. That’s an average of over one track every day. Taupin had written the lyrics for the album’s songs in just two-and-a-half weeks, with John composing most of the melodies in three days while staying in Jamaica. That month’s work produced a masterpiece that has, to date, sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. The farm, it turned out, could wait.