Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding

There’s a moment—and if you’ve been paying attention, you know exactly what I’m talking about—around the five-minute mark when the funeral march finally breaks and those piano chords come crashing in like a drunk stumbling into a Vegas chapel at 4 AM. That transition. That’s the thing.

I first heard this in a friend’s basement in 1974, stretched out on a carpet that smelled like cigarettes and possibility. Sixteen years old. No idea what I was going to do with my life. But for eleven minutes, none of that mattered.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin didn’t write a song here. They built a cathedral, then burned it down, then rebuilt it out of the ashes while you watched. The instrumental opening—“Funeral for a Friend”—is eleven kinds of prog-rock pomposity that somehow works. Synthesizers swirling like fog over a Welsh graveyard. It’s indulgent. It’s excessive. It’s glorious.

Then the transition happens, and suddenly you’re in “Love Lies Bleeding,” and Elton’s pounding those keys like they owe him money. The band is tight, absolutely locked in, riding that groove like it’s the last bus out of town.

To this day, this is the only song that makes me believe I can actually play piano. My car dashboard has taken years of abuse from this track—I’m genuinely sorry for whatever’s left of it. And just when you’ve got the piano part down, around the six-minute mark Davey Johnstone’s guitar comes snarling in, and now you’re switching between air-piano and air-guitar like a lunatic at a red light. It demands full participation.

I’ve come back to this track at every major waypoint of my life. Breakups. Funerals—real ones. Cross-country drives where the only company was the yellow lines and my own thoughts. It never fails. It meets you wherever you are and says, “Yeah, I know. Let’s get through this together.”

The 1973 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album gave us “Bennie and the Jets,” “Candle in the Wind,” all the hits. But this opening salvo? This is the real statement. The rest is celebration. This is the reckoning.

Eleven minutes. No skipping ahead. No half-measures. You commit to this thing or you don’t bother at all. That’s the deal Elton and Bernie made with you fifty years ago, and it still holds.

Some songs you listen to. This one you survive.