10 Perfect Rock Songs That Don't Have Any Lyrics

10. Funeral for a Friend - Elton John

Around the same time that Elton John's star started to rise, his studio time wasn't exactly rosy. He was a few years away from writing songs like Someone Saved My Life Tonight, but Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was barely recorded in one piece, originally going to Jamaica and having to be taken out of the country by police after the political unrest got too out of hand around their recording spot. Elton definitely had a morbid streak, and his opus kicked off with one of his most vulnerable recordings.

For all of the great ballads that he's written over the years, Elton has always ben a fan of the funeral dirge style of music, and this piece was built around the kind of music that he would have wanted to hear at his own funeral. Coming from the same album that has songs like Bennie and the Jets and Candle in the Wind, this is a far more epic way to start things off, as Elton takes to the pipe organ to create this cathedral like sound in your headphones before the rest of the band comes in.

That's just the beginning of the madness though, with the song transitioning into Love Lies Bleeding, giving us the more lighthearted side of Elton's music with the same kind of downtrodden lyrics, talking about everything splitting apart and Elton having to tend to his own emotions once his relationship leaves him wounded. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was already going to be a massive undertaking, but both sides of this song are a good indicator of the light and the dark that was to come.