(Feel free to make fun of me for this post.)
It’s a well-known fact that YouTube is awesome.
One of the most fun–although maybe not legal(?)–pleasures of YouTube is watching videos of live performances.
For instance, if you’re an Elton John fan like me, you can watch an entire concert of performances over several decades just by using the “Related Videos†feature.
Or, you can watch the evolution of a song like “Your Songâ€, Elton’s first big hit, over five decades.
The Sixties
This is a demo recording of Your Song from 1969 (there’s actually no video). The melody and vocals are actually quite different from the studio version released in 1970.
The Seventies
This is a live performance from 1970. It’s pretty similar to the studio release.
The Eighties
This is a live recording from a concert in Australia with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. You can tell that he’s sung the song thousands and thousands of times, and he gets pretty creative with certain parts of it. His voice is a bit hoarse, I think because he had throat polyps. The album of this concert is one of my favorite live albums.
The Nineties
This is after surgery to correct the throat polyps, and he’s lost a good portion of the lower range of his voice.
The First Decade of the Twenty-First Century (We still don’t have an accepted name for this decade, do we? When will we decide on one? Probably in 2010.)
This is from his 60th birthday party at Madison Square Garden.