Elton John's new album is influenced by the partial vision loss the musician has experienced in recent years.
He explained this in a speech at the Glenn Gould Prize evening held at the Great Canadian Casino Resort in Toronto. He described the record as particularly upbeat and explained that the loss of his sight caused by an eye infection contracted in 2024 forced him to approach composing in a new way.
“I usually compose by looking at lyrics and writing based on them so I'm in a bit of trouble at the moment.” Since he could no longer do it, he experimented with a new approach. «I had the opportunity, at the age of 80 (he turned 79 in March, to be precise, ed), to completely overturn my way of writing. Now I write the melodies before the lyrics. I've never done it before.”
The result is «a completely different album from anything I've done so far, but it's very cheerful. I'm enthusiastic about it because it gave me another opportunity to make music” also because, he added, “if I don't make music, I die. If I don't listen to music, I die. Music is my soul, it is the strength that keeps me going. It is everything and has always been everything in my life.”
In 2014 John explained that due to the infection he had “limited vision in one eye” and that “it will take some time for his sight to return”. Just over a year later he explained when talking about it with Variety which «was devastating. Since I lost my right eye and the left one doesn't work well, the last 15 months have been very difficult, I haven't been able to see anything, look at anything, read anything.”
It is not clear at the moment what the precise conditions of the sight are. In March, her husband David Furnish said that Elton “is fine, he's fighting, he's keeping busy and moving forward.”
