Bernie Taupin has spent fifty years being the most famous person nobody recognizes. Half of one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in history, present on the sleeve of virtually every major Elton John album — resplendent in fringed leather chaps on Rock of the Westies — yet functionally invisible the moment he hands over his credit card. He calls it being 'the credit card guy,' and he means it as a compliment. The Sea Has No Mercy is different from his previous solo attempts in one specific way: Taupin wrote the music this time too. His 1971 debut had him reciting poetry over Elton's band (he openly disliked it in interviews). He Who Rides the Tiger in 1980 and Tribe in 1987 were commercial swings he never fully committed to. Farm Dogs, a mid-90s 'midlife crisis band,' produced two albums before dissolving. None of those projects were truly his in the way this one is. This one, he says flatly, is 'something 100% selfish.' The album was recorded in Nashville at producer Frank Liddell's home, and it sounds like it: folk, country, ambient textures, and one genuinely strange Tom Waits-adjacent number called Joker that Taupin describes as 'a rant, basically, about how we live.' At 76, his voice has developed what he himself calls a patina — that specific grain that comes from living inside a body for a long time and not pretending otherwise. It suits the material, which he describes as 'a late-life manifesto.' The Elton stories remain irresistible. 'I'm Still Standing' was, Taupin reveals, a kiss-off to an ex-girlfriend — but he never told John that, letting him take his own interpretation and turn it into a comeback anthem about personal resilience. The Eagles wrote 'New Kid in Town' about him, apparently not affectionately. He was a member of the Hollywood Vampires — the notorious mid-70s LA drinking club with Keith Moon, Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper, and Ringo Starr — and he is not buying Micky Dolenz's revisionist claim that they were mostly interested in golf. 'Golf? None of those guys could play golf except for Alice.' Fifty years into American assimilation, Taupin no longer feels even 'remotely' British, despite growing up in Owmby-by-Spital, Lincolnshire. He lives near Santa Barbara. He competed professionally in cutting — the rodeo discipline where a horse and rider separate a cow from its herd. He co-owned a three-times bucking bull of the year called Little Yellow Jacket. His daughter is a barrel-racing rodeo star in Texas now working for the Professional Bull Riders. He is not performing a bit. He simply left. His ambitions for the album are deliberately modest: one live date, at the Grand Ole Opry, performing with his daughter Georgey who sings on the closing track 'One Hundred Ways,' described as a meditation on mortality and parenthood. A career-spanning documentary is due at year's end. He is not worried about losing his anonymity at this stage. He is probably right — though the Grand Ole Opry performance and the documentary together suggest a man doing something closer to taking stock than launching a second act. What this album represents is less a commercial proposition than a personal one: proof, assembled at leisure, that the man who put words in someone else's mouth for half a century had something to say in his own voice all along. Whether it finds an audience almost seems beside the point. Taupin has already had his success, already had his anonymity, already ridden his bulls. The Sea Has No Mercy sounds like a man who knows exactly that.
