(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Mon 10 November 2025 15:00, UK
Elton John has sold over 300million records over the course of his career, and is undoubtedly one of the highest-selling artists of all time. It’s fair to say that not many of those 300million came from sales of his 2004 album Peachtree Road, though.
He didn’t need to prove anything by 2004, though. His legend was long since established, his reputation secure, and his place in history assured. Perhaps that’s why he sings on the first song that “fortune and fame is so fleeting these days, I’m happy to say I’m amazed that I’m still around and the weight of the world is off my back”.
With the now-to-be-expected lyrical excellence of Bernie Taupin set to a classic sounding Elton John melody and production, ‘Weight of the World’ and penultimate track ‘”It’s Getting Dark in Here’ are the kind of elder-statesman statement songs which would be lauded as late career masterpieces if they came from the pen of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, but which received very little in the way of attention or interest when coming from Reg Dwight. Similarly, ‘Porch Tree in Tupelo’ is exactly the kind of blues-roots song that Van Morrison has been churning out for the last twenty or thirty years to varying degrees of popular acclaim.
Peachtree Road, named for the Atlanta street where one of John’s houses is located and which so obviously invokes Goodbye Yellow Brick Road as a title, reviewed steadily but sold less impressively, topping out at about 100,000 units shipped and peaking at number 21 in the charts.
“It is probably one of my lowest-selling albums of all time”, John has said about the record. “It was disappointing everywhere in the world, so I have to hold my hands up and accept that the songs just didn’t connect. I’m proud of Peachtree, but, if I think about it logically, people may have ten or twelve Elton John albums in their collection already. Do they need another one?”
Maybe the music buying public in 2004 felt that they didn’t need another Elton John record, but it’s fair to say that by opting to avoid this one, they missed out some of his better latter day songs, and a body of work that for the most part feels like the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from the more mature version of the man who sang ‘Rocketman’, ‘Daniel’ and ‘Your Song’.
Of course, the work doesn’t always stand up against some of those earlier songs but when you’ve set the bar as high as Elton John did in the early 1970s, that is to be expected. There’s certainly plenty here to reward paying closer attention to the album and, from John’s perspective, to be proud of.
Perhaps the album would have received more attention if he had included the outtake from the sessions ‘Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher’ (written by Lee Hall, who later went on to write the screenplay for Rocketman in 2019), which contained the lyrics “We all sing together in one breath, ‘Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher’. We all celebrate today ’cause it’s one day closer to your death”!
Related Topics
