Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

The working titles were Vodka and Tonics and Silent Movies, Talking Pictures. Taupin wrote the lyrics in two and a half weeks, and John composed most of the melodies in three days at the Pink Flamingo Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica. He had wanted Jamaica partly because the Rolling Stones had just recorded Goats Head Soup there. Sessions began there in January 1973 but were abandoned before anything productive was done, after trouble with the sound system and the studio piano, the Joe Frazier and George Foreman fight in Kingston, and protests over the country's political and economic situation.

The album was then recorded in two weeks at the Studio d'enregistrement Michel Magne at the Château d'Hérouville, where John had made Honky Château and Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player. The band plays on every song except "This Song Has No Title", where John performs all the piano, keyboard and vocal parts. Dudgeon said it was not planned as a double album. John and Taupin wrote 22 tracks and 18 were used, counting "Funeral for a Friend" and "Love Lies Bleeding" as two. "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" came from memories of a Market Rasen pub that Taupin drank in when he was younger, and "Grey Seal", a 1970 B-side, was recorded again.

It entered the Billboard 200 at 17, reached number one in its fourth week and stayed there for eight weeks, and was the best-selling album in the US in 1974. It also topped the UK chart for two weeks, with number ones in Australia and Canada too. The singles were "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Bennie and the Jets" and "Candle in the Wind". "Harmony", the last track, was considered as a fourth single but was held back, and it was the B-side of the US "Bennie and the Jets". The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003, ranked 112 on Rolling Stone's 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums, and in 2025 was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry. The cover shows John stepping into a poster, in an illustration by Ian Beck.