Hear Elton John Dig Out Deep Cut ‘Skyline Pigeon’ at Rock in Rio

Elton John played a rare post-farewell tour concert Monday night at Brazil’s Rock in Rio — appearing on a bill that also included Foo Fighters, Maroon 5, Twenty One Pilots, Demi Lovato, Black Eyed Peas, and Halsey — and his 23-song set included the first live rendition of his 1969 deep cut “Skyline Pigeon” since 2019.

“This next song is the first good song I wrote with Bernie [Taupin],” John told the audience. “And Brazil is the only place it’s ever been popular, so here we go.”

“Skyline Pigeon” appears on Elton John’s 1969 debut LP, Empty Sky. “We wrote lots of other songs before then which were sort of really esoteric, sort of gibberish,” John told David Frost in 1991. “You had to realize it was flower power at this time and a lot of pretentious high lyrics, but ‘Skyline Pigeon’ was a nice song. The lyrics are so beautiful. ‘Turn me loose/ From your hands/Let me fly to distant lands/Over green fields, trees and mountains.’ So those four lines for me sound like a hymn. It’s the sort of thing you sing in church. So immediately, I saw that I went, oh, let’s get a chord sequence that sounds like a hymn.”

“Skyline Pigeon” was largely ignored in 1969 since Empty Sky was a commercial dud. But once John broke through the following year with his self-titled LP, many fans went back and rediscovered it. In 1972, John and his touring band re-recorded “Skyline Pigeon” during the Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player sessions and released it as the B-side to “Daniel.” That version appeared on the Brazilian soap opera Carinhoso, which turned it into a hit in Brazil.

That’s why his previous 17 live renditions of “Skyline Pigeon” took place in Brazil, Ecuador, or Chile. He last played it in America at a Ryan White tribute concert in Indianapolis on April 28, 2010. Back in 1990, shortly before he went to rehab, Elton sang an emotional “Skyline Pigeon” at White’s funeral.

“It’s very hard to choose the appropriate song to sing at something like that,” John told NPR in 2012. “It was a song about release and freedom, and death is [a] kind of release and freedom. It’s a very pretty song, a very pretty lyric. And so I sang it then, and it seemed the most appropriate thing to sing and the lyrics seemed to go beautifully with the passage of crossing over to the other side, as it were.”

John has been off the road since his 330-date Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour concluded in July 2023. But he continues to play private events and the occasional one-off charity or festival gig. On June 4 of this year, he played at the McDonald’s Worldwide Convention at the Convention Center in Las Vegas. The set included the McDonald’s jingle “You Deserve a Break Today.” He also performed at a private 60th birthday party at the Dallas House of Blues for Elizabeth Walraven, wife of Texas businessman Marc Walraven on Valentine’s Day.

He’s next playing October 2 and October 3 at Estadio Banorte in Mexico City, while also working on a new record. “I literally don’t know when that is,” Bernie Taupin told Rolling Stone in July. “He did it with Andrew Watt again … he basically came up with instrumental tracks and threw basically three or four of them at me and said, ‘Can you do something with these?’ Which I contributed to. But he’s also worked with a couple of other people on there, which is great. So it’s a whole different ballgame for him.”