Jewel Box

Product Information

This collection contains148 songs spanning 1965 to 2019, of which 60 are previously unreleased. The first two CDs feature ‘Deep Cuts‘, a selection of personal favourites curated by Elton himself and what follows that are three CDs of Rarities. The rarities include many, many piano demos and band demos mostly recorded before he was signed or had released his first album, Empty Sky, in 1969. Elton John delves deep into his archive for a new 8CD box set called Elton: Jewel Box, which features an astonishing amount of rarities, deep cuts and B-sides. John already has one career-spanning boxed set behind him, the out-of-print To Be Continued…, but Jewel Box goes out of its way to be a very different, sometimes maddening beast. Its eight discs include a substantial chunk of unheard early material, like those Zippo tunes, but they sit alongside an even bigger batch of songs that have already been released in one form or another, either on albums or singles. Jewel Box doesn’t just clean out the closet but the whole house. Flipsides, never before compiled together. Those B-Side gems that are now given another chance to shimmer. Among other things, Elton John’s sprawling new box set answers a question most of us have never even pondered: Did he have his own version of Smile? A few years after Brian Wilson had tried and failed to complete his attempted masterpiece with the Beach Boys, John considering launching his career—after playing in bands and doing sessions—with a psychedelic album, which even sported a straight-outta-Spinal-Tap title, Regimental Sgt. Zippo.

David Browne (12 November 2020). "Elton John's Eight-Disc 'Jewel Box' Rewrites the Story of His Epic Career". Rolling Stone. Elton’s debut album Empty Sky, released in June 1969, wasn’t a success at the time. But for those who listened, it contained definite signposts to his fast-blooming talents as a songsmith and piano player, and to Taupin’s as a lyricist of considerable culture. One of its best-known songs was the ballad “Skyline Pigeon,” featured in Jewel Box in its simple, piano-and-vocal demo recording which is in some contrast to the harpsichord-adorned LP version. For a further comparison, try the live version on the 1976 album Here and There, recorded two years earlier at the Royal Festival Hall. There, he describes it as “the first song Bernie and I ever really felt excited about that we wrote.” Elton and Bernie’s first co-write predated their meetingSubsequent to their original appearance on 45 or CD-single, a number of these non-LP B’s were included on 1990’s box set To Be Continued...and even more found a home on Rare Masters (1992) and various studio album CD reissues. But for decades, many of the B-sides to Elton’s 1980s singles had never appeared on CD or in an official collection, and most of his 2000s non-CD B-sides were not issued worldwide. Until now.

An in-depth exploration of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's extensive catalogue including early rarities and deep cuts personally curated by Elton. Discs 3–5 contain early demos of previously unreleased material as well as original piano demos of songs from his earlier albums. On 17 September 2020, two months prior to the album's release date, a 1969 demo recording of "Sing Me No Sad Songs" was released for the very first time. This song, described as "a fascinating early taste of what was to come from Elton and Bernie", was used to promote the album. [2]

On The Go

Added Taupin: “We referenced ‘Scarecrow’ in a song later on. There’s a line in ‘Curtains’ [from 1975’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy). It says, ‘I used to know this old scarecrow/He was my song, my joy and sorrow.’ That was a tip of the hat to the very first song we wrote because Captain Fantastic was an album about our early trials in the music business.” His B-sides contain buried treasure Elton has never stopped loving the music of the man who first turned him on to Americana in all its glory. Leon Russell was an immense influence on the young singer-songwriter, as he and Bernie began their songwriting adventures, and he was famously in the audience at Elton’s career-changingTroubadour shows of August 1970. The admiration was already mutual; Russell had tried to sign the young Englishman, just too late, to the Shelter label. A couple of months afterwards, Leon invited Elton to open for him at the Fillmore East. Elton comes from the days when 45rpm, and later CD, singles, were the focal point of any mainstream artist’s profile. With the insane work schedule he always maintained, that meant a lot of singles, and a lot of B-sides. Like many artists in that era, his insatiable creativity and his desire (as a record buyer himself) to give value for money often meant that his big numbers were released with flipsides that never appeared on LP.