Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Elton JohnEdition: Music CD
Format: Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2008-06-03
Music Label: Island / Mercury
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Ballad of a Well-Known Gun
- Come Down in Time
- Country Comfort
- Son of Your Father
- My Father's Gun
- Where to Now St. Peter?
- Love Song
- Amoreena
- Talking Old Soldiers
- Burn Down the Mission
- There Goes a Well-Known Gun [#][*]
- Come Down in Time [Piano Demo][#][*]
- Country Comfort [Piano Demo][#][*]
- Son of Your Father [#][*][Version]
- Talking Old Soldiers [Piano Demo][#][*]
- Into the Old Man's Shoes [Piano Demo][#][*]
- Sisters of the Cross [Piano Demo][#][*]
- Madman Across the Water [Original Version][*]
- Into the Old Man's Shoes [*]
- My Father's Gun [BBC Session][*]
- Ballad of a Well-Known Gun [BBC Session][#][*]
- Burn Down the Mission [BBC Session][#][*]
- Amoreena [BBC Session][#][*]
Free Music Notes for Tumbleweed Connection
Free Music Review: Not quite Deluxe enough
Hit: 4 Stars
"Tumbleweed Connection" is a fantastic re-imagining of the American West by a couple of brilliant young British songwriters who had never been there. Other reviewers here have described the album, and if you think you are interested in Elton's breakthrough years, you need to have this. The songs are inventive, poetic, and rockin', and Elton's vocals and piano playing are superb. It's beautifully arranged and recorded, but more of a piano-based rock album than the self-titled album that preceded it. There isn't a bad song on it, and it may be Elton's most thematically unified work. In addition, since it never had a hit single, it is not as well known as most of his early works, so it is easy to listen to it with a fresh appreciation. (The least known is his first album, "Empty Sky", which is so easily forgotten that the sticker on this new edition mistakenly says that "Tumbleweed" is his second studio album...which means his own CD company completely forgot about "Empty Sky" which preceded both "Tumbleweed" and the self-titled one!)
The 2008 Deluxe Edition has some nice extras, but falls short of being an essential upgrade. Disc One consists solely of the original running order of the album, and the mastering sounds identical to every CD version released since 1995 (including the Japanese imports). But that's fine...it sounds great and that may be the best mastering they can get out of the original masters. (Or maybe they can't find the original two-track masters...that happens more often than you want to know.)
Disc Two has some nice piano/vocal demos for the album, but there are several other demos from the album that have circulated in good sound quality on a bootleg called "Tumbleweed Collection", so it is too bad that Universal didn't track those down as well, to make it a more complete picture. The piano demos included here are fun to hear, played and sung extremely well by Elton (he would have had to have done them live, probably in his publisher Dick James' studio), but they don't have the spark that their final album versions have once they got input from the producer and fellow musicians. There are demos for a couple of songs which were later dropped from the lineup, but even though they are lovely, I think the album was stronger by not including them.
Also on Disc Two are some alternate versions of songs. The most surprising is a country rock version of "There Goes A Well-Known Gun". It sounds more like standard country rock of the early `70's, but ultimately Elton slowed it down a bit, gave it more of a Rolling Stones-type roughness with an aggressive piano-based rhythm section, and bluesier vocals.
Elton's instincts could occasionally go awry in the studio, but in live performance in the `70's he was electrifying. The last four tracks on Disc Two are BBC radio performances, three of which haven't been released before, and they're wonderful. Elton already knew how to lead a rock band with his pounding piano, but the band and vocalist always served the songs, and the songs are very, very good. The style and content are similar to Elton's first live album, "11-17-70", but with no audience present. These are tracks you are likely to listen to more than once or twice, unlike the rest of Disc Two.
The Deluxe Edition packaging is very nice, with original artwork, lyrics, musician credits, and a few new pictures from the period, but the included essay about the album is largely identical to the one in 1995. This comes across as kind of lazy. TC is a much loved album by musicians, so it would have been nice to hear from players who either worked on the original sessions or were influenced by it.
So I give this Deluxe edition four stars. It's a classic album that's a pleasure to listen to today, and this is the best release so far of it, but it could have been a better presentation with just a couple more days of work. (Actually, no reissue producer is listed, so maybe nobody was particularly motivated to push it to the next level.)
Tumbleweed Connection Poster
2008 digitally remastered deluxe two CD edition of Elton's hit album featuring a bonus CD containing 13 additional tracks including previously unreleased cuts, demos and more. Originally released in 1971, Tumbleweed Connection featured EJ classics like 'Burn Down The Mission', 'Love Song' and 'Country Comfort'. This deluxe edition features piano demos of many of the album's tracks plus BBC sessions and more. 23 tracks total. Universal.Pop Music CDs
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