The artwork Elton John has displayed on the walls of his home in the Hollywood Hills wasn’t necessarily intended to reinforce a running theme. Yet you can’t help noticing how some of the paintings suggest a preoccupation that has consumed him through nearly four decades. On the wall nearest the picture window overlooking the Los Angeles Basin is one of Andy Warhol’s blazingly chromatic 1960s portraits of Elizabeth Taylor. And in the small dinette off the foyer where we will have an audience with John, there is a Keith Haring original.
The latter is a painting by a famous figure in the art world who died of AIDS. The other, a loving rendering of an actress who was among the first beloved celebrities bold enough to dedicate herself to the fight against AIDS when the public and government were still largely washing their hands of a “gay plague.”
Sir Elton was not so very far behind Dame Elizabeth when the HIV crisis was at its height, publicly befriending the terminally afflicted teenage victim Ryan White and then, in 1992, establishing the Elton John AIDS Foundation — the entertainment world’s foremost charity devoted to the cause, and the fifth largest HIV philanthropic funder in the world.
John splits his time between his homes in London and Los Angeles, where he lives with his husband, David Furnish, and their two children, Zachary, 14, and Elijah, 12. In recent years, Furnish has joined John in interviews, partly because they work together as collaborators in addition to being spouses… and because, as chairman of the EJAF, he is the keeper of those facts and figures… and, incidentally, also is the keeper of the app that controls John’s hearing devices. (“I’m too loud now, I’m feeding back,” John tells Furnish. “I’m like Pete Townshend!”)
When I arrive at their Los Angeles home, Furnish warmly greets me, and we have a preamble discussion about his and John’s decades of fundraising, before John appears at the table in the kind of sudden, magical, slightly stealthy way that has tended to occur since he was beset by vision problems in the past couple years. As it happens, John is in a jovial mood — except for when we pick up the discussion of factors that have stifled a once-stated mission to eradicate new HIV cases worldwide by 2030.
When it comes to those roadblocks, the bitch is back.
Love Film & TV?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in music, film and TV in Australia and abroad.
“I just am enraged by it,” John says, talking about goalposts shifting in the U.S. and globally. “It’s very frustrating when you’ve got the tools in your hand to end it, and then you find that countries in Africa, Russia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe won’t help.”
That forces the U.S. to do even more, except the trend is toward budget cutbacks at a time when there is no momentum to ramp up funding associated with the LGBTQ+ community.
“You know, there’s a big war that’s being settled, hopefully,” John says, referring to Gaza. “But there’s another war. with people who are suffering from HIV and AIDS that should be able to get their medicine but can’t, because governments won’t let them. It’s inhumane. So my big beef at the moment is, yes, thank God, maybe there’s peace, after more things are sorted out. But there are crimes against millions of other people that are happening because of governments and stigma and hate. It’s so frustrating when you have the medicine, you have prep, you have the antiretrovirals. We can stop the spread of AIDS, if people just got off their backsides and treated human beings in a Christian kind of way.”
“Elton’s a little blunter than me,” whispers Furnish, chuckling approvingly at how the 20 minutes of numbers crunching and policy wonkdom he just provided have been supplanted by his husband’s display of passion.
Two years ago, John says, they took a trip with a U.S. delegation to South Africa to look at efforts there, and “Lindsey Graham said it was the best bang for your buck you could possibly get.” He likes to point out Republican support like that, past or present, in the instances in which he’s able. “The bipartisan thing makes common sense. To see us come so far with the medical and scientific advances, and to think this is the only disease that can be completely cured in one’s lifetime. President Trump has maybe solved the peace problem. If he wants to go down as one of the greatest presidents in history … if he ended AIDS, that would really be a feather in his cap.” This is John the businessman talking. Although he politely declined to perform at Trump’s 2016 inauguration, John has a long history of knowing the president, and he understands that speaking in superlatives might possibly move the needle for his cause.
But couldn’t he just call the president on the phone, the way he does Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron? Here, Furnish steps in to answer, saying they have had very positive conversations with representatives in Washington.
Sitting at this table, John recalls how, in 1991, they gathered around another kitchen table, at their former home in Atlanta, and began mapping out the Elton John AIDS Foundation, in part as a response to what he saw as more wasteful charities.
“People trust us because they see the results,” he says. “It’s quite extraordinary what’s happened from that little kitchen table. We’ve now raised over $650 million, but with matching grants, we’re over a billion dollars. But there’s so much more to be doing there. If there’s no dialogue, it may take much longer than we hope it will. You can’t walk away after coming so far. And sometimes you feel like beating your head against a brick wall, but that doesn’t do any good to the people that are suffering.”
John can relate to suffering right about now. In the summer of 2024, vacationing in France, he contracted an eye infection, with seemingly permanent effects on both eyes, one more drastic than the other. (He’s blind in his right eye.) He does not whitewash the emotional as well as physical effects. But, he says, “I’m really, really lucky. And this helps me, the AIDS Foundation, because when you think, ‘Oh, I’m really feeling sorry for myself,’ and you think of these people [affected by the crisis] and how much work we’ve gotta do, you soon come out of it.”
After all these decades in music, John is still standing, even if he can’t see much. Sight has not been part of the deal in the arc of Elton John’s ongoing survival story.
Any time he makes an appearance these days, he is posed already seated, or seems to have just arrived by magic, as he did today; there is no desire to have his public — or a reporter — see him being led around. Yet, at the same time, it’s as if he has no vanity about it after all, when he candidly discusses where he is with the severity of his vision problems. He is even the first to bring it up.
“It’s been devastating,” he says. “Because I lost my right eye and my left eye’s not so good, the last 15 months have been challenging for me because I haven’t been able to see anything, watch anything, read anything.
“I’ve had the most incredible life, and there is hope,” he believes. “I’ve just gotta be patient that someday science will help me with this one. Once they help me with this one, I’ll be fine. It’s exactly like the AIDS situation. You mustn’t give up hope, you must be stoic, you must be strong and you must always try and batter the door down to try and improve things.”
Furnish elaborates on where things stand. “We’ve been doing some treatments and there’s been some improvements in his left eye, which is really good, and we’re continuing to explore and getting a lot of outreach from a lot of doctors who want to help and support. Because there’s damage to the retina in his right eye, retinas don’t heal naturally, so it’s an area of emerging science. But things are changing really quickly. What AI is doing for medicine and science alone is astonishing. And there’s all kinds of interesting new theories and breakthroughs, and they can process the data and do the trials a lot more quickly than they could before.”
There is an “on the other hand” for John, amid these trials. “On the other hand, I’ve still been able to play. I’m still singing. We did the Singapore Grand Prix the other day with the band, which was wonderful. I mean, you just have to grin and bear it. It does get me down sometimes. But on the whole, I’ve got a wonderful family; I have two great kids; I have him” — he indicates the oft-beaming Furnish by his side. “Paul McCartney FaceTimes me to see how I’m doing. It’s really beautiful. The love I’ve received from him and from Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger and people like that have been amazing. Or you get an email from Keith Richards saying, ‘Hello, darling, how you doing? You know we love you,’ and that’s it, but it just makes my day.”
John returns the favor, especially when it comes to playing electronic pen pal to the younger singers he mostly prefers listening to over old favorites. “If you support and you love artists, you keep in touch,” he says. But there’s an extra rationale. “The thing with my iPad is, I can actually see someone close-up. So I often call Chappell, and of course I always call Brandi because she’s one of my best friends. But it’s a way of me staying in communication with people.”
None of John’s maladies are evident as he meets you, seemingly eye to eye, in person. Once in place, he could pass for perfectly sighted.
Furnish says that they have come up with a giant-type computer screen that allows John to do at least a little bit of reading now, with his less compromised eye. John was motivated, his husband notes with perhaps a bit of amusement, by his intense desire to be able to see and keep track of the midweek charts. Once a music geek, always a music geek.
“It’s tough to go and see a show,” John admits, “because I saw Chappell out in the desert [at Coachella] and I saw Brandi at the Albert Hall, and they were both incredible shows. But I can’t really see what’s going on.”
Furnish has an asterisk for that. “Yeah, but you were giving Brandi lighting notes,” he points out as they both erupt in laughter. “You were in the back of the box at the other end of the Albert Hall, and you were giving her lighting notes! Which I just love.”
“I was,” agrees John sheepishly. “At least I can do that.” This could be a sign of the slight improvement in the left eye, Furnish suggests. Or, you know, it may just be Elton John being a boss.
The annual Oscar-viewing parties held by the Elton John AIDS Foundation are another joy in John’s life. Much of what the EJAF does these days is behind the scenes, except for this. “We don’t do many fundraisers now,” John says. “We used to do a white-tie-and-tiara at our house in Windsor every summer, which was incredible. But the Oscar party is now the thing” as the public and media face of the foundation. And it’s grown and grown and grown.
“We’re so lucky to have our party as the only charity event on Oscar night,” says Furnish. “Actually, it was Patrick Lippert [a political activist who died in 1993] who put his flag in the soil years ago and then gave the night to EJAF. But we have the largest entertainment charity event of the year, which the whole world is plugged into, and that’s a really great thing. We get tremendous media coverage. And just keeping HIV/AIDS in the dialogue is really important, because the medicines are so successful that people aren’t seeing people still sick and dying from AIDS the way they used to.”
“And people really have fun at our Oscar party,” John adds, “and I think they get big bang for their buck, as Lindsey Graham would say.” For one thing, he notes, it’s loose enough that “you can boo the winners. Which I do on a regular basis.”
This past winter, John and Furnish were latecomers to the party, coming by after losing the best song nod they shared with Brandi Carlile; no catcalling occurred. Quite unlike any other Oscar party, stage rushing is a factor toward the end of any EJAF night, especially in a year like this one, when Roan did a headlining set in front of a small but frenzied audience of just under 1,000 partygoers, after not having played in L.A. since rising to stardom. And as Carlile says, “It was great seeing Elton sing ‘Pink Pony Club’ with her. It was perfect when she put the pink cowboy hat on him. Even though I didn’t win an Oscar that night, I saw Elton in a cowboy hat.”
Indeed, when Roan placed the pink totem upon his head, John could not have looked any more like a giddy schoolboy if he were a kid in the front row of “The Eras Tour” being gifted Taylor Swift’s “22” hat. At this late stage in his life, John takes on the role of both mentor to young artists and, in his glee, pure fanboy. He thinks he was among the first to play “Pink Pony Club” on his “Rocket Hour” Apple radio show, and having seen Roan subsequently, he appreciates how the band is “just three girls, no bells and whistles, no dancers, just a really fucking great rock band. And her stagecraft and her way of performing a set, spacing it and everything like that … she’s an old soul. Olivia Dean, Lola Young, same thing — it’s great to see these girls. They’re ready for it.”
Carlile and Roan represent almost flip sides of John’s split musical personalities over the decades — Carlile is his early singer-songwriter Honky Chateau side, with a touch of glam-rock; Roan is the flashier Ms. Captain Fantastic, but heavy on the singer-songwriter tip herself. When the two women had a joint conversation at the Grammy Museum early this year, on some level it felt like a gathering of John’s daughters. And they shared with the audience what it is like to get random FaceTime visits from John, with Roan telling how she would be clothes shopping in a thrift store and get a call from John lasting just long enough to make a catty remark about her hair color before hanging up.
Ed Sheeran has similar Bluetooth convos with John that have nothing to do with music. “He’s obviously got a very funny sense of humor,” Sheeran says. “He’s always, always got some opinion, usually football based. He’ll usually ring me and just swear about some player.”
On a more serious level, Sheeran has an assessment of where John’s legacy lies. “I love his passion for younger artists, and I love his musical journey. I think it’s important for artists like me to see how his career persists and isn’t just uphill or downhill — it traverses.” Referring to the Elton John AIDS Foundation and his related consciousness-raising, Sheeran notes: “I think that, even more than his music, in some ways, will be his legacy.”
Even as he struggles to see, John won’t exactly be mistaken for a shut-in, even with a far less busy schedule on the heels of his much-celebrated retirement from touring, which included a series of 2022 U.S. farewell shows at Dodger Stadium, before his farewell tour finally tapered off in Europe the following year. In fact, he remains a semi-active performer, and a galvanizing one. Fans got a glimpse of that when he recently did “Saturday Night Live” and a TV special filmed at the London Palladium to promote the collaborative album he released with Carlile earlier in 2025, “Who Believes in Angels?” On top of that, he does one-off gigs, many of them private acoustic shows-for-hire for 200 to 300 people, and a few of them public, like a San Diego stadium show he did with his band a few months ago as a benefit for a hearing foundation.
Anyone who has seen him in recent years, before or after the supposed retirement, knows he remains in top musical form. He may need to be led to the piano before the lights come up, but once there — to quote a song he once sang — “he’s got crazy flipper fingers, never seen him fail.” The voice: still utterly there too.
For anyone unclear on the concept of why John is still at it: “Elton always said he was retiring from touring, not retiring from working,” Furnish says.
John says: “I’ll have done 11 private shows by the end of the year, which I’ve never done in my life — some solo, some with the band. And it’s been fun, because I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to see the piano keys or the microphone. And I can see, because everything’s so close up. What I can’t see when I’m playing with the band is the band, which is a bit of a nightmare. I can’t see Nigel [Olsson], the drummer, so I have to have Davey [Johnstone, John’s lead guitarist] or somebody say, ‘OK, this is where it ends,’ and make sure we’re in sync.
“But I tell you what, I’m singing better than I’ve ever done before, and I’m playing really well, and I’m enjoying it, and that is helping me a lot. Music has been my whole life and has given me so much and takes me on journeys that I never thought I would ever go on — and it’s still doing that. I just like doing the odd thing. It pays the rent very well, and it keeps me musical. I just can’t wait to go into the studio now and write some new songs and go from there.”
Will he be able to read Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, to write music from? Yes, says Furnish. “This is where we’re getting encouraging little baby steps, going in the right direction, which is really good. We [found] a teleprompter with a green typeface, which is easier for him to read. And we got the font size great, and we just put that in front of him when he’s writing at the piano. It’s just like having Bernie’s handwritten sheet of lyrics in the ’70s… I’ve got seven new lyrics from Bernie, and David read them to me the other night and they’re really, really good, so I can’t wait to go in the studio with Andrew [Watt, his recent favorite producer] and just write and see what happens.”
He is currently up for two Grammys for “Who Believes in Angels?,” his collaborative album with Brandi Carlile, recorded in late 2023 and released early this year — best traditional pop vocal album, and best song written for visual media (for “Never Too Late”). It was predicted to get an album of the year nomination but missed out there, with veterans typically left in the lurch in today’s Grammys — although John notes that even in his commercial heyday it was not happening. “I’ve never been a favorite of the Grammys, I have to say. It’s been very rare that I’ve won anything,” he notes. “I won something for ‘The Lion King,” he points out (that marked the first time he won anything for a solo vocal recording). Furnish is slightly flabbergasted: “Elton and Bernie have never won a Grammy — can you believe that? — as a pair of songwriters.” So if he and Taupin pick up the award for song for visual media, that will, bizarrely, mark a first.
John remains extremely proud of this year’s release with Carlile, which debuted at No. 1 in the U.K. and in the top 10 in the U.S. “When I did the record with Brandi, I said, ‘You’re established in America, but I want this record to establish you in other places,’ and that was one of the main reasons to do it.’ After we did the Palladium together, she did the Albert Hall; she has a huge following now, there, and a following in Australia, and she just went back to England to do promotions (for her own solo album, “Returning to Myself”), and I can’t believe how many people turned up. I wanted her to become an international artist, and that album has pushed her into the fore in those countries. So it did the job. …. (An award) would be nice because I believe in the album and it didn’t sell as well as we hoped it would, but of course it’s a different ballgame now. I follow the charts every week. It’s not that kind of album.”
The next project won’t be as retro/early-‘70s-redolent an album as “Who Believes in Angels?” “The album with Brandi, it’s a timeless record, but it’s not of its time. We just wanted to make a record that we loved, with great songs. That was a yesterday record, and it was fantastic. But there is a part of me that wants to do a much more commercial record and do more Bernie Taupin songs that are more of today than yesterday.”
In the meantime, there is this coming weekend’s release of a live Elton/Brandi album taken from that one-off performance earlier this year, “Who Believes In Angels? Live at the London Palladium,” being released exclusively on vinyl in limited quantities for Record Store Day Black Friday. This is part of John unfailingly putting out an exclusive release every time there’s a Record Store Day, putting his money where his mouth is as a vinyl geek. When I ask him about the live album, he mistakenly thinks I am inquiring about what he planned to pick up this Friday, and quickly reels off an RSD shopping list from memory: “Well, the list is always so long. I picked out three things this time: ‘The Very Best of Deee-Lite,’ Carmen McRae’s ‘“I’m Never Coming Home Again,’ and there was one other one… Oh, John Lee Hooker, ‘Chill Out.’” (Some of those are only being released in England, so your RSD shopping list may vary.)
He also has just put out a deluxe vinyl double-LP edition of one of his classic albums, “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Kid.” Preparing it gave him cause to look back on his catalog in a way he typically has not, as a determined forward-thinker resistant to nostalgia.
“It’s a wonderful album,” he announces of “Captain Fantastic,” almost as if he’s touting one of his favorite younger artists he just discovered for his “Rocket Hour” Apple Radio show. “It’s probably my favorite album, the way it’s recorded, the way it was written — written on the SS France, going from Southampton to New York. I had the music room for an hour every lunchtime. I wrote the songs, didn’t record, didn’t have a tape recorder, I remembered them, and then went to Caribou and finished it off.” He reels off some of his favorite tracks: “We All Fall in Love Sometimes,” “Curtains,” “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”… “It moves me a lot because it was about Bernie and myself, and every song is about our life before we became famous.” (He has also just put out a live album of the 1975 album from top to bottom at Wembley Stadium, which he thinks sounds great, even though for 50 years he had harbored a bad memory of everyone at the gig “going out to the stalls” once they realized he was performing then-all-new material.)
Furnish says, “It’s really nice, as we’re doing these projects, that while Elton never looks back, he never listens to old stuff, now you’re pulling out these older performances and you’re like, ‘Wow.’ You’re really quite blown away with the musicianship.”
“Well, Andrew Watt came over and stayed with us in the summer,” says Elton, “and you can get this app on the internet where you can just be listening to ‘Rock of the Westies’ and pull out isolated music stems, so he just could get the piano track to things like ‘Street Kids.’ And I never listened back to anything, but that’s such a great record. That band was just amazing. I’ve gotten much more fond of my old catalog than I used to be, because I hadn’t listened to it, but I realize now how musical it was. I mean, we made three orchestral albums — ‘Elton John,’ ‘Tumbleweed (Connection)’ and ‘Madman (Across the Water),’ and then Davey joined the band and we went in a completely band direction and made ‘Honky Chateau,’ ‘Don’t Shoot Me,’ ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,’ ‘Caribou and ‘Captain Fantastic.” And then I changed bands and we made ‘Rock of the Westies’ and ‘Blue Moves,’ which was another one of my favorites. And every album was different; I never made the same album twice… It’s bringing me joy, because the stuff actually was really good musically, and that’s all I care about.”
There are limits to his newfound nostalgia for aspects of his own career. He’s grateful he quit the road when he did, partly to go out as a regular tourer still at the top of his abilities, largely to spend more time with his and Furnish’s boys.
A song that Carlile wrote for the duo album about the slow emotional separation of parents and children, “You Without Me,” meant a lot to Elton, as someone about to experience more of that as the kids go through their teen years. “We kind of went through that with our eldest son going to boarding school, and our other son will be joining him next September, and then we’ll be alone in their house until they come home every third weekend. So, yes, it’s happening to us as it was happening to Brandi, although her kids haven’t gone away yet. But yes, we’re so close to our children, as they are to theirs, that it’s gonna have an effect on us.”
But the prospect of not having the kids at home full-time as of next fall doesn’t mean that he’ll get bored and renege on his vow to leave the road in the dust.
“Touring is verboten,” he declares. “When I did the ‘Spinal Tap’ film and we drove into the Coliseum in New Orleans, I went, ‘David, I’m having hives. I’m backstage, and I don’t want to ever be in a place like this ever again!”