#144, "My Father's Gun," Elton John (1970)

150 Favorite Songs: #144, “My Father’s Gun,” Elton John (1970)

My dad died last year. Even thirteen months later, it doesn’t quite feel real, doesn’t quite make sense. I know he’s gone, but there’s a part of me that, every time I think about that fact, still raises its hand to say “but no, that can’t be right,” and I imagine that part might be there forever.

It happened very suddenly. I had woken up one morning expecting to get on a plane to New York to cover a story for the magazine, and my top priority that day was renewing my driver’s license so I’d be able to rent a car to drive to Connecticut. By noon that day, I’d canceled that trip and booked a flight to Indianapolis, because he was in the hospital and it didn’t seem likely that he would be going home.

That week (or was it two weeks?) is still a blur. I remember having a layover in Houston and meeting my brother at the airport; I remember my sister and her husband picking us up in Indy at midnight, and how they’d brought a coffee cake and cereal so we’d have something to eat at in the morning. I remember friends who wanted to help and show support and love however they could sending DoorDash gift cards so my mom didn’t have to figure out what we would all eat. I remember spending long hours at the hospital. I remember driving my dad’s fucked-up little Kia, with a broken stereo and windows that didn’t roll down and which smelled like smoke, to the hospital.

And I remember playing music on my phone, the volume turned all the way up, while I drove, and how so many of the songs I loved didn’t match my mood, didn’t get at the feelings I was actually feeling. It wasn’t a time for subtlety. And then the first line of “My Father’s Gun” came into my head, and I think I listened to it fifty times that week. I’d put it on repeat and just listen to it four or five times while I drove to the hospital in the morning.

“My Father’s Gun” isn’t one of the more famous Elton John songs. It’s a deep cut from Tumbleweed Connection, which isn’t one of the more famous Elton John albums. I learned this song from a movie trailer—maybe Elizabethtown? I never saw it—and it got buried somewhere in my brain, and then when I needed it, it was there.

It’s a weird song. It’s written from the point of view of a confederate soldier, which is bizarre, and it’s fairly committed to the bit. There are lines like “it wouldn’t do to bury him / where any yankee stands” and “I’ll wear the color of the grey / and join the fight again,” real specific stuff that just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for an Englishman to be singing about, and not the sort of thing I tend to feel a lot of connection with in any case.

But grief is weird, and enormous, and heavy, and “My Father’s Gun” is overwrought in that Elton John sort of way, which is to say that it’s huge and dramatic, and that is how I felt, too, and so I got to express a lot of feeling that it’s hard to get at just from singing along with it with those windows rolled up in that Kia. I didn’t want nuance. I wanted to scream-sing the words “from this day on, until I die / I wear my father’s gun” with tears on my face. I wanted a huge hook with horns and strings and an organ. I wanted a chorus that repeated six times in a row, with a choir doing backing vocals. I didn’t want anything literal, not while I was driving to the hospital to watch my dad die. I just wanted something that matched the bigness of what I was feeling. If I was getting that in a weird song about those evil yankees sung from the point of view of a confederate soldier waiting for “the bells of freedom,” well, that’s where I was getting it. The fact that there are so few other circumstances in which “My Father’s Gun” would be a song I could relate to was a good thing. It was a soundtrack to something I hadn’t felt before.

Is it a great song? I don’t know. But the line between ridiculous and great can be thin, and it often depends on context. I know that the first time I made this list, back when I was writing it on Tumblr and my dad was alive, “My Father’s Gun” was not a song that I would have considered for it. But it provided a lot of comfort to me at a time when that was hard to find, and that’s not a small thing. If Elton John needed to imagine himself a confederate soldier plotting how to get to New Orleans to rejoin the fight in order to capture how intense and dramatic and overwrought grief can feel, well, grief is not an emotion that works logically or linearly, and for a week last year, it made sense to me, too.