Andy Greene
View all posts by Andy Greene September 8, 2026
Elton John performs at the Mundo Stage at Cidade do Rock on September 07, 2026 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Buda Mendes/Getty Images Elton John played a rare post-farewell tour concert Monday night at Brazil’s Rock in Rio — appearing on a bill that also included Foo Fighters, Maroon 5, Twenty One Pilots, Demi Lovato, Black Eyed Peas, and Halsey — and his 23-song set included the first live rendition of his 1969 deep cut “Skyline Pigeon” since 2019.
“This next song is the first good song I wrote with Bernie [Taupin],” John told the audience. “And Brazil is the only place it’s ever been popular, so here we go.”
“Skyline Pigeon” appears on Elton John’s 1969 debut LP, Empty Sky. “We wrote lots of other songs before then which were sort of really esoteric, sort of gibberish,” John told David Frost in 1991. “You had to realize it was flower power at this time and a lot of pretentious high lyrics, but ‘Skyline Pigeon’ was a nice song. The lyrics are so beautiful. ‘Turn me loose/ From your hands/Let me fly to distant lands/Over green fields, trees and mountains.’ So those four lines for me sound like a hymn. It’s the sort of thing you sing in church. So immediately, I saw that I went, oh, let’s get a chord sequence that sounds like a hymn.”
“Skyline Pigeon” was largely ignored in 1969 since Empty Sky was a commercial dud. But once John broke through the following year with his self-titled LP, many fans went back and rediscovered it. In 1972, John and his touring band re-recorded “Skyline Pigeon” during the Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player sessions and released it as the B-side to “Daniel.” That version appeared on the Brazilian soap opera Carinhoso, which turned it into a hit in Brazil.
That’s why his previous 17 live renditions of “Skyline Pigeon” took place in Brazil, Ecuador, or Chile. He last played it in America at a Ryan White tribute concert in Indianapolis on April 28, 2010. Back in 1990, shortly before he went to rehab, Elton sang an emotional “Skyline Pigeon” at White’s funeral.
“It’s very hard to choose the appropriate song to sing at something like that,” John told NPR in 2012. “It was a song about release and freedom, and death is [a] kind of release and freedom. It’s a very pretty song, a very pretty lyric. And so I sang it then, and it seemed the most appropriate thing to sing and the lyrics seemed to go beautifully with the passage of crossing over to the other side, as it were.”
