QA: T Bone Burnett on 'Nashville,' Elton John's Comeback and Retiring as a Producer | Music News | Rolling Stone

QA: T Bone Burnett on 'Nashville,' Elton John's Comeback and Retiring as a Producer | Music News | Rolling Stone:

The Elton portion of the RS article;

What's the current status of Elton John's The Diving Board record?
We're gonna record some more songs in January, I think.

Really?
I hope so. I can't – you know, you can imagine what [Elton's] schedule is like. But we're gonna go in at some point after the first of the year and do some recording. I think he's been writing some more tunes; he's written a whole suite of tunes for something else; he's been productive as hell, so I don't know. It's nice to have the luxury of time to be able to look over a piece of work and see how it wears with you.

Would this be the third time you guys have gone in to work on it and track?
It may be. We may have come in two or three different times. We did with The Union, for certain – there were three or four different spells of that one, so, yeah. The first batch of songs went incredibly fast and they were powerful, you know, it was an explosion! So, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

Is it still gonna be a more raw, stripped-down affair?
Yeah, yeah. We're going in with the same guys; we're not retooling or anything like that, we're just keeping going.

Why do think it's the right time for Elton to do a record like that?
It was totally personal for me, because I was at the Troubadour – he did a week at the Troubadour that changed this town [Los Angeles] and changed the world, really. . . . [Former Los Angeles Times music critic] Robert Hilburn wrote a very eloquent piece on him and everybody in town went to see him because he was killer, he was just killing it. So they were talking, this was maybe the 20th-year anniversary of it, or 50th-year anniversary or whatever anniversary it was. [Laughs.]

I think 40th year.
Fortieth, yeah! And they were talking about it and I thought, "Let's just do that – let's just go in with a killer trio and do a rock & roll record." So [Elton] just went, "OK, let's go!" I don't know, maybe that's just where he's at, you know?

What's the extent of Raphael Saadiq's involvement?
So far he's just been playing bass like crazy, man. I'm looking for a place for him to sing; I hope he'll do a little singing, but so far Elton's done all the singing.

Well, he's good at that.
Yeah. [Laughs.]

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