Elton John will release a massive eight-disc box set teeming with rarities and unreleased tracks. Elton: Jewel Box, which will be released on November 13th, includes a whopping 148 songs spanning Elton's entire career — with three discs dedicated to rarities from 1965 to 1971. The collection will be available on eight-CD's, four-LP's, three-LP's, and two-LP's. As a teaser to the set, Elton has released a lyric-video for the previously unreleased 1969 track, “Sing Me No Sad Songs.”
Jewel Box is broken up into four sections: “Deep Cuts,” “Rarities,” “B-Sides 1976-2005,” and “This Is Me. . ,”. which features songs that were specifically name-checked into Elton's recent memoir, Me, and serving as a soundtrack to the book.
Jewel Box comes in a hardcover book “with the discs housed in the back, all wrapped in an outer slipcase. Each section comes accompanied with extensive notes including a track-by-track commentary by Elton for 'Deep Cuts.'”
Elton issued a statement about the upcoming Jewel Box collection:
To delve back through every period of my career in such detail for Jewel Box has been an absolute pleasure. Hearing these long lost tracks again, I find it hard to comprehend just how prolific Bernie (Taupin) and I were during the early days. The songs just poured out of us and the band were just unbelievable in the studio.
I always want to push forward with everything I do and look to the future, but having time during lockdown to take stock and pull these moments from my memory from each era has been a joy.
As a devout record collector myself, this project has really excited me and I couldn’t be happier with the level of craft involved in such a carefully curated, lovingly constructed box set. I’m sure my fans will enjoy it as much as I have.
During a recent chat with Classic FM.com, Elton John shed light on how he composes his music these days: “I write very quickly — but I starve myself from writing. I don't write very often. I write every two years — in the early years, it was every other week, but now I don't write very often. I'm writing in Australia when I'm going to be there. I haven't written an album for two or three years, three or four years. I'm looking forward to writing. 'Never know what to expect. That's the great thing about writing. I never know what I'm gonna get, so the process has never gotten dull, it's always been 'Oh, what's this one gonna be?'”
