The Catalog That Won’t Let You Go

Elton John has a way of following you through time whether you invited him or not—the soundtrack to someone’s wedding, the film you watched too young, the radio you caught by accident late on a Sunday. He didn’t invent pop music. But in certain melancholy moments, you could almost believe he did.

Revamp is a tribute album that gathered an impressive cross-section of the current landscape: Mary J. Blige, Alessia Cara, Miley Cyrus, Coldplay, Florence + The Machine, The Killers, Lady Gaga, Mumford & Sons, Queens of the Stone Age, Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith—all doing their version of the catalog. Some of these interpretations land exactly where you’d expect. A few are genuinely surprising.

The first single out was Demi Lovato and Q-Tip covering Don’t Go Breaking My Heart—a stranger pairing than it sounds, and better for it. Lovato has always had a rawness that suits Elton’s more exposed moments, and Q-Tip brings that effortless, unhurried authority that makes everything he touches feel considered without seeming labored. Hearing it made me want to dig out my old Elton John CDs, which are definitely somewhere in this apartment, behind things I bought more recently and paid far less attention to.