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Elton John: Breaking Hearts

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Rocket Records
Released: 1976.10.22
Time:
 40:38
Category: Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Chris Thomas
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.eltonjohn.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Restless (E.John/B.Taupin) - 5:17
[2] Slow Down Georgie [She's Poison] (E.John/B.Taupin) - 4:10
[3] Who Wears These Shoes? (E.John/B.Taupin) - 4:04
[4] Breaking Hearts [Ain't What It Used to Be] (E.John/B.Taupin) - 3:34
[5] Li'l 'Frigerator (E.John/B.Taupin) - 3:37
[6] Passengers (E.John/B.Taupin/D.Johnstone/P.McHize) - 3:24
[7] In Neon (E.John/B.Taupin) - 4:19
[8] Burning Buildings (E.John/B.Taupin) - 4:02
[9] Did He Shoot Her? (E.John/B.Taupin) - 3:21
[10] Sad Songs [Say So Much] (E.John/B.Taupin) - 4:55

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Elton John - Keyboards, Lead Vocals
Davey Johnstone - Guitar, Vocals
Dee Murray - Bass Guitar, Vocals
Nigel Olsson - Drums, Vocals
Andrew Thompson - Saxophone on [5]
Ray Cooper - Percussion
Bernie Taupin - Wind

Chris Thomas - Producer
Renate - Engineer
Renate Blauel - Recording
Tim Young - Mastering
Joe Black - Project Coordinator
David Costa - Art Direction, Design
Jane Hitchin - Tape Research
Patrick Jones - Photography
Richard D. Young - Photography
Zoe Roberts - Tape Research
Jim Taig - Tape Operator
John Tobler - Liner Notes

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded at Air Studios, Montserrat
Overdubs at 301 Studios, Sydney, Australia
Mixed at Air Studios, London, England



Building off of the success of his previous long player Too Low For Zero (1983), Elton John (piano/vocals) retained his 'classic quartet' for the follow-up Breaking Hearts (1984). After an eight year ('75-'83) hiatus Dee Murray (bass/backing vocals), Davey Johnstone (guitar/backing vocals) and Nigel Olsson (drums/backing vocals) briefly reunited with John and Bernie Taupin (lyrics) to attempt a musical resurrection of their early-to-mid '70s sound. Without question this is one of John's most consistent efforts during his half decade on Geffen Records ('81-'86). However the shift in pop music styles since 1975 as well as lack of edgy material, seemed to stifle the band's return to full form circa Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (GYBR) (1973) or Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975). Breaking Hearts was not light on hits either, yielding "Who Wears These Shoes" as well as the Top 5 smash "Sad Songs (Say So Much)"." The oft over looked "L'il 'Frigerator" is a high octane rocker that could be considered a post script to "Your Sister Can't Twist (But She Can Rock 'n' Roll)" from GYBR. The opening cut "Restless" is also one of the spunkier tracks and came off particularly well when John hit the road with his formidable sidemen to support the disc. The vast majority of Breaking Hearts however, is met with varying degrees of success. Both "In Neon" and the reggae-dub influenced "Passengers" were best suited to the lighter pop genre and Adult Contemporary radio format where John joined the ranks of Phil Collins, Lionel Ritchie and George Michael. This stylistic direction, while concurrently popular, also criminally under-utilised the synergy between the artist and band. With the exception of the noir 'unplugged' title performance "Breaking Hearts (Ain't What It Used To Be)" a majority of the LP is indistinguishable from much of the rest of his mid '80s and early '90s catalogue.

Lindsay Planer - All Music Guide



After a meteoric stretch in the ’70s during which he and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin released a string of classic records, Elton John limped out of the ’70s at a low ebb. And for a while, it looked like he might never reclaim his chart-topping mojo — but by the early ’80s, he was already in the midst of a critical and commercial comeback.

The Elton revival entered full swing with the release of 1983′s ‘Too Low for Zero,’ which saw Taupin penning all the lyrics for the first time since the ‘Blue Moves’ LP in 1976. “It was all kind of a mistake,” John later said of the duo’s sabbatical. Looking back on the sessions for 1978′s Taupin-free ‘A Single Man,’ he recalled, “I started to write a lot of melodies, faster than I’d ever done before. Gary Osborne had been a mate of mine for many years and I just said to him, ‘Look, I’ve got all these melodies, can you give me some words?’ … Bernie was living in Los Angeles, and I was living in England, and he didn’t particularly want to come to England, and I certainly didn’t want to go to Los Angeles. It was a coincidence that led people to believe we’d broken up.”

However it happened, John and Taupin’s time apart couldn’t end too soon for the majority of fans, who turned the album into a Top 40 Platinum hit and sent a trio of singles (‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues,’ ‘I’m Still Standing,’ and ‘Kiss the Bride’) onto the airwaves. Unlike some of the records the continually prolific John put out, it felt like it meant something — and as he later admitted, that’s because it definitely did.

“I was so proud of that album,” John said of ‘Too Low for Zero’ during an interview conducted in the weeks before ‘Breaking Hearts’ was released. “I felt that was the first album I’d done for a long, long time where it was a great, great album. I was happy with everything. I said to my manager, ‘If this one doesn’t happen, I will give up, and I’ll become a greengrocer.’”

Flush with resurgent momentum, John retained pretty much every piece of his ‘Too Low for Zero’ formula when it came time to record a follow-up, including returning to Montserrat to record as well as retaining the services of his recently reunited core combo: guitarist Davey Johnstone, bassist Dee Murray, and drummer Nigel Olsson, plus Taupin, who was now firmly re-entrenched as John’s full-time lyrical partner. And although John’s larger-than-life public persona might have led some to believe that the sessions’ idyllic setting would lend itself to partying and assorted debauchery, John insisted that he had a very different reason for recording in paradise.

“You’re away from everybody,” he explained. “Throughout my career I’ve always recorded places that have been away from, more or less, the city. You go there to work — we record from 10 in the morning until 8 at night, and then by that time you’re absolutely knackered and you go to bed. You get up the next morning and you work. From a creative point of view, if I’ve got four weeks or three weeks of work to do, I can do it, and I’m not bothered by anyone.”

The album, originally titled after its opening track, ‘Restless,’ found John migrating away from the piano and focusing more on emerging synthesizer technology — not in order to fit in with trendy new sounds, but because it helped him get closer to the sounds in his head. “My biggest hangup has been writing rock ‘n’ roll songs,” he pointed out. “I’m not very good at it. Because if you’re a pianist, it’s a totally different concept from playing guitar. It’s very hard to write three-chord songs on the piano. So I can write complex songs and ballads, but the fast songs I’ve written, I’ve never really been entirely happy with.”

Armed with gadgetry that could take his playing and make it sound like anything he wanted, John found it easier to write rock arrangements he could be happy with, and the result proved a refreshing change of pace — for John, anyway. “It was a complete departure. I was writing songs on a rhythm box and recording them straightaway,” he enthused. “It really only took about two weeks to record that album — written and recorded. [Producer Chris Thomas] did a week’s overdubs in L.A., and that was it.”

Released in June of 1984 — just over a year after ‘Too Low for Zero’ — the new album, now titled ‘Breaking Hearts,’ continued John’s ’80s hot streak, peaking at No. 20 on the Billboard 200 and going Gold by September of that year. In terms of singles, it proved a bit of a comedown, with only one song — the closing track ‘Sad Songs (Say So Much)’ — making much of an impact. While a Top Five single is never anything to sneer at, in retrospect, ‘Breaking Hearts’ presaged a period in which John released a slew of rapid-fire albums to diminishing returns; neither 1985′s ‘Ice on Fire’ nor 1986′s ‘Leather Jackets’ are widely considered among his finest works.

‘Breaking Hearts,’ however, captured a moment that found John happily reunited with his longtime songwriting partner and surrounded with some of the musicians who’d helped create his biggest hits, and if it doesn’t contain many of the delirious highlights fans had come to expect from his best albums, neither does it fall prey to most of the traps that would ensnare him later in the decade. “‘Breaking Hearts’ is really one of my favorite albums,” reflected Taupin in a 1989 interview. “I think it’s my favorite album of that particular period, although ‘Too Low for Zero’ has some very good songs on it.”

For John, what mattered at the time was being able to work his way back from an artistic nadir and reclaim the simple fun of playing rock ‘n’ roll. “I think I’m making better records and writing better songs, and I’m just enjoying it again,” he shrugged during an interview from the road during the ‘Breaking Hearts’ tour. “The moment I stop enjoying it again, I’ll stop.”

Jeff Giles - June 29, 2014
UltimateClassicRock.com



Breaking Hearts is the eighteenth studio album by British singer/songwriter Elton John, released in 1984. It features the quartet of John, Davey Johnstone, Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson. There were two hit singles from the album: the US #5 hit "Sad Songs (Say So Much)" and the UK No. 5 hit "Passengers".

This was the last studio album until 2001's Songs from the West Coast that would feature Olsson on drums. It was also the last in which John played both piano and keyboards in the studio by himself. There would be a backup keyboardist for every album moving forward.

Breaking Hearts was also the first album since Victim of Love to not feature a string or horn section on any track. This is one of only two albums with John's classic band in which Ray Cooper was not part of the line-up, the other being 1973's Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player. Shortly after the tour, the band line-up would change and Gus Dudgeon, John's former producer, would produce the next two albums. In the US it was certified gold in September 1984 and platinum in August 1998 by the RIAA.

Wikipedia.org
 

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