It’s mediocre.

This album should not have been produced by T-Bone Burnett, but Rick Rubin.  Rick is famous for getting his acts to get back into the headspace they inhabited when they did their best work and forcing them to write and write and write until they come up with material just as good as they composed in their heyday.  Where was the editor on "The Union"?  Where was the guy saying…HEY, WE DON’T HAVE THE TUNES!

Great concept.  I love both Elton and Leon.  Great that Elton is now about the music and not the hits.  But if you’re about the music, it’s got to be great.

I mean we endured all that buildup and the endless hype for THIS?

We knew mediocrity was in the offing when the first single was released.  Huh?  I don’t know anybody who liked it.

Today we only have time for great.  Forty years ago, when these acts broke, we’d buy the albums based on the rep, play them because we possessed nothing else, and ultimately know them.  Anybody who plays this record that much is either involved or related.  With so much music at our fingertips, why listen to this?

There are too many midtempo songs that you wait to go somewhere that don’t.

Sure, there are a couple of tracks that capture a bit of magic.  "Hey Ahab" for Elton, "A Dream Comes True" for Leon.  But there’s nothing close to their strongest work.  There’s no "Stranger In A Strange Land", never mind "A Song For You" or "Delta Lady".  If only Elton’s contribution yielded something as good as the obscure but great "Can I Put You On".

I remember dropping the needle on "Friends".  The title track hooked me immediately.  There’s not one track that hooked me on "The Union".

And the mainstream blather.  The reviews in every paper known to man.  How old school a selling technique for supposedly a breakthrough concept.

Wanna know a breakthrough concept?  Record an album so good that it has legs and sells itself!  Something that people hear and testify about, play for their friends.

I remember being at my next door neighbor’s hearing Mary Chapin Carpenter’s "Come On Come On".  I didn’t think I was interested,  I certainly wasn’t a fan.  But I was infected listening to this album in the background, I had to ask what it was, I had to get it and play it and play it and play it.

That’s not the experience anybody’s gonna have listening to "The Union".

First and foremost the material must be great.  This sounds exactly like the hype.  That they found a window when both performers were available, wrote the songs in two weeks and recorded them immediately.  I’m not saying that can’t work, maybe Elton did it that way in the old days.  But it doesn’t always work.  Not every date is a success.  You may have sex, but you don’t meet your soulmate.  Wasn’t there anybody in this process who could put up his hand and say WAIT A MINUTE, WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE MATERIAL!

Projects like this illustrate that classic rockers still live in the old world.  We don’t need an album, we don’t need fourteen so-so tracks, we need ONE PHENOMENAL ONE!

Elton’s burned his rep here.  We’re gonna be suspicious when he touts his next project.

This is how it works in the modern world.  Either you put out a limited amount of great material or you inundate your fans with a constant stream of stuff, let them investigate and judge it, separate the wheat from the chaff, extricate the nuggets.

DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE!  This album is a dud.

And today a dud is anything that’s not great.  Sorry, that’s the way it is, I don’t make the rules, the public does.  A public that’s inundated with diversion and only has time for the very best.

P.S. It’s not about the short term, but the long haul.  Otherwise, most YouTube clips would have a lifespan longer than a day.  It’s not about the initial hype, it’s not about the first week sales, it’s about the cumulative effect.  Don’t frontload your campaign, your project will be forgotten as quickly as last weekend’s movies.  No, now the game is to make something so good that it finds its own way in the marketplace, doesn’t instantly die but grows and grows over time.  Sure, Elton & Leon are touring this now, but wouldn’t it be better to put out an album that people want to hear six months or a year from now, when they’re truly fans of the music and not just curious because of the hype?