A man like me is dead in places - other men feel liberated

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

14/10/01 : Songs From The West Coast - Elton John

Our fifth album visit with Elton (along with two singles visits) and I've never heard this one, but remember it being well received at the time, so I'm intrigued to listen to it.

I recognised "I Want Love" and, although I'd completely forgotten about it, I actually quite liked it. I also particularly liked "The Ballad Of The Boy In Red Shoes" but, for the most part, the rest of the album is at a similar quality level and harks back to the classic Elton of the 70s. Somewhat ironically, the one track that annoyed me was the updated version of "Your Song". I love the original version for its simplicity and boy do they piss about with it here - it's a duet with some Italian opera style dude and they throw a children's choir in there as well. If we ignore that track though, this is a pretty decent album that I can imagine my dad listening to on his 8 track in the 70s - and there's no higher praise possible for an album trying to hark back to those days!

We're at #4 in the charts this week on his second week of an impressive 32 week run, with it having peaked at #2 in its debut week. The rest of the top five were Kylie, Starsailor (a new entry), Paul Weller (ditto) and David Cassidy (huh?) with the next highest new entry being Leonard Cohen (#27, with the snappily titled Ten New Songs).

Wikipedia tells us this is his 26th album (he's only done five since) - most of the rest of the entry is a massive name-dropping exercise, but if Elton can't name-drop then I don't know who can! The album features lyrics from Bernie Taupin and has guest appearances from Stevie Wonder, Billy Preston, Rufus Wainwright and Gary Barlow. Which is a decent enough list to start, but the videos go out of their way to push things further with Robert Downey Jr, Justin Timberlake, Mandy Moore and Elizabeth Taylor appearing - and the video to "I Want Love" was directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, who also shot the album cover photo. The critical reviews were generally positive, with many comments that it harked back to his earlier work, although there were disagreements as to exactly how successful he was at hitting those heights. Commercially, it did pretty well globally, but never quite made it to #1 anywhere, getting to #2 in Norway, #3 in Italy and #15 in the US - it still sold 1.5 million copies globally.

discogs.com tells us this is another fifty pence album and the absolute most you can spend is £13.08 - what it is about '01 that makes the albums all so cheap? I'd guess it's something to do albums still being churned out in high quantities, but mostly on CD - amazingly enough, Google AI agrees with me. This is a considerably better album than most we've met this year though - I imagine a vinyl re-release would go down very well in certain circles (aka "men of a certain age").

21/10/01 - Pretty decent