It begins with a piano, gentle and unhurried, and then a voice bidding farewell to a woman he never met. “Goodbye, Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all.” In 1973, those words opened one of the most tender songs on the biggest album of Elton John’s career. Twenty-four years later, the same melody, with new words, would become the best-selling single since charts began, sung at a funeral watched by hundreds of millions of people. No other song in popular music has lived two lives like this. “Candle in the Wind” is a song about fame, about how it lifts people up and burns them out, and fate arranged for it to prove its own point twice: first as a tribute to Marilyn Monroe, then as a farewell to Diana, Princess of Wales. It is, at heart, one song about the same tragedy, told in two different eras, for two different women, and it has never stopped moving people.
To understand why the song mattered in 1973, you have to understand where Elton John stood. He was no longer a promising newcomer; he was becoming the biggest pop star in the world. His early albums had built a devoted following, and then, in 1972 and 1973, the hits came in a rush: “Rocket Man,” “Crocodile Rock” — his first American number one — and “Daniel.” By the spring of 1973, he and his lyricist, Bernie Taupin, were working at a pace that seems almost impossible today. The two men had met in 1967, when both answered an advertisement for songwriters, and they had developed a method that never changed: Taupin wrote the words, John wrote the music, usually in under an hour, and the band learned the song the same day. For their seventh album, they went further than ever before. They decamped to the Château d’Hérouville, a recording studio in a French country house, and in May 1973 they wrote and recorded a double album of seventeen songs. It was called Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and it would become John’s best-selling studio album, a sprawling, eclectic masterpiece that contained the title track, “Bennie and the Jets,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” and, tucked near the start of the record, a quiet ballad called “Candle in the Wind.”
The song began with a phrase that would not leave Taupin alone. He had heard the record executive Clive Davis describe the late Janis Joplin, who had died of a drug overdose in 1970 at twenty-seven, as a “candle in the wind.” “I just kept hearing this term,” Taupin later said. “I thought, what a great way of describing someone’s life.” He also knew the phrase from the title of a book by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. What he did with it was to turn it into a portrait of fame itself. He had long wanted to write a song about Marilyn Monroe, the most famous woman of the twentieth century, who had died in 1962 at thirty-six, eleven years before the song was written. But he was determined not to write something tacky or sentimental. “I tried to make it a song that told you the reason she was so popular,” he said, “and that she was very much somebody people could fall in love with without her being out of reach. I really don’t think people thought of her as a sex symbol.” The opening line gave Monroe her real name, Norma Jeane Mortenson: “Goodbye, Norma Jean, though I never knew you at all.”
What makes the lyric endure is that it is not really a biography. It is an argument about fame. The verses describe a woman put on a treadmill by the press and the studios, her name changed, her private life turned into public property, hounded even in death: “And even when you died, oh, the press still hounded you, all the papers had to say was that Marilyn was found in the nude.” The chorus turns the image of the candle into a verdict on celebrity: a life lived “like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in.” Taupin himself has always insisted that Monroe was, in a sense, interchangeable. In the documentary about the making of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, he said the song is about “the idea of fame or youth or somebody being cut short in the prime of their life. The song could have been about James Dean, it could have been about Montgomery Clift, it could have been about Jim Morrison — how we glamorise death, how we immortalise people.” In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, he went further, disputing the idea that he had been a Monroe fanatic at all: she was, he said, a metaphor for fame and dying young. Decades later, in his 2025 memoir, he revealed that his very first spark for the song had come from watching Montgomery Clift in The Misfits. But the song he actually wrote belonged to Monroe, and to everyone like her.
The music came as quickly as the words. As the album’s engineer, David Hentschel, later remembered, many of the album’s songs were written over breakfast and recorded the same day. With “Candle in the Wind,” John sat at a piano in the château’s large dining area while everyone else was eating and wrote the melody on the spot. “Quite magical,” Hentschel called it. The band — Davey Johnstone on guitar, Dee Murray on bass, and Nigel Olsson on drums — listened as he played, then walked over to the studio and laid the track down. The result is a study in restraint: John’s voice and piano lead, in the key of E major, with Johnstone’s guitar adding a mournful, unforgettable riff. There is no grand production, no orchestra, no showmanship. The song sounds like a man sitting at a piano thinking about someone he never knew, and that simplicity is exactly why it has lasted. It is, as Taupin himself later said, one of the best songs the two of them ever wrote.
When Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was released on October 5, 1973, it was an immediate triumph, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. But “Candle in the Wind” itself had a strangely modest start as a single. The album was so strong — seventeen songs, several of them obvious hits — that the record company had almost too much to choose from. In Britain, the song was released as a single in February 1974, with “Bennie and the Jets” as its B-side, and it climbed to number eleven, held out of the Top 10 by David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” and Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Jet.” In America, it was not released as a single at all. The label chose “Bennie and the Jets” instead, and John, who had actually preferred “Candle in the Wind” as the single, watched his choice become one of the great American number ones of 1974 while his ballad stayed an album track. The song did not need a chart position to enter the culture, though. It became a staple of John’s concerts and a favourite of his fans, and Rolling Stone would later place it at number 347 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It also found a second chart life in America more than a decade later: a live version recorded in Sydney in December 1986, with John accompanying himself on piano backed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, was released as a single in 1987 and reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and number five in Britain, winning John the 1988 Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
None of that, however, prepared anyone for what happened in 1997. On August 31 of that year, Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car crash in Paris. John had been a friend of Diana’s, and he was, by his own account, utterly shell-shocked. The Spencer family asked him to sing at her funeral, and the question was what to sing. A new song could not be written in the few days available, so John and Taupin turned to the one song in their catalogue that already said what needed saying. Taupin rewrote the lyrics, replacing the tribute to Monroe with a tribute to Diana. The opening became “Goodbye, England’s rose, may you ever grow in our hearts.” According to one account, Taupin completed the rewrite in about two hours. John performed the new version, for the first and only time with those lyrics, at Diana’s funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997, in front of a congregation that included the royal family and a television audience estimated in the hundreds of millions. He has said since that he will only ever perform the 1997 version again at the request of Diana’s sons, William and Harry.
Immediately after the funeral, John went to Townhouse Studios in London and recorded the new version with the producer George Martin, the man who had produced the Beatles. Where the original had been voice and piano and a small band, the 1997 recording added a string quartet and woodwind, giving it a funereal, almost classical gravity. It was released on September 13, 1997, just two weeks after Diana’s death, as a double A-side with “Something About the Way You Look Tonight,” and the response was beyond anything the music business had ever seen. In Britain, it sold 658,000 copies on its first day and more than 1.5 million in its first week, spending five weeks at number one and eventually selling 4.86 million copies, making it the best-selling single of all time in the UK. In America, it entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number one, selling nearly 3.5 million copies in its first six days, and stayed at the top for fourteen weeks, a run ended only by Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply” at the start of 1998. In Canada it spent an extraordinary forty-five weeks at number one. Worldwide, it sold an estimated 33 million copies, becoming the first single ever to receive Diamond certification in the United States, for sales of 11 million, and Guinness World Records declared it the biggest-selling single since charts began. Only Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” whose sales stretch back to before the chart era, is estimated to have sold more overall, a distinction Guinness itself later clarified. Every penny of the artists’ and composers’ royalties went to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, and the single won John another Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
The success had a strange afterlife of its own. Within a few years, the very ubiquity of “Candle in the Wind 1997” turned some listeners against it; in a poll by The Observer and Channel 4, it was voted the second-worst song ever, behind only the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.” John himself has never repeated the funeral performance in public, and the song has become, in a sense, a royal relic, a piece of music that belongs to a single day in history. Yet the original has only grown in stature. On streaming services, the 1973 version has been played far more than the 1997 version, and it remains the version fans reach for. That is fitting, because the original is the more universal song. The 1997 version is a eulogy for one woman; the 1973 version is a meditation on all of them, on the price of being adored by strangers, on the loneliness inside fame, on the way the world claims ownership of people it never knew. Taupin wrote it about Monroe, but he was right that it could have been about anyone cut short in their prime, and history has now supplied the proof twice over.
There is a final irony worth sitting with. The song argues that fame is a candle in the wind, beautiful and doomed, and that the press and the public feed the flame even as they mourn it. When Diana died, the same machinery of attention that the song describes — the cameras, the headlines, the crowds — gathered around her funeral, and the song written about that machinery became the soundtrack to it. John and Taupin did not plan that. They wrote a ballad at a breakfast table in France in 1973, about a movie star who had died eleven years earlier, and it turned out to be a song capacious enough to hold the grief of an entire world. That is why it endures. Most hit songs are about a moment. “Candle in the Wind” is about the way moments like that keep happening, and about the strange comfort of a melody that can say goodbye for us when we cannot find the words ourselves.
So listen to it again, and hear both lives of the song at once: the piano in the French château, the voice bidding farewell to Norma Jean, and, underneath it, the echo of a September morning in Westminster Abbey, when the same notes carried a nation’s grief. A candle in the wind is a fragile thing. This one, against all odds, is still burning.
Watch the video below and hear the original version that started it all.