Elton John is up against one of his toughest competitors in this year’s Oscars for ‘best song’ or any other musical accolade – himself.
This year, he will have two songs in the running for the Academy Award for best original song 2019. With the soundtrack for the ‘Lion King’ (2019) being released, it has shown that Tim Rice and Elton John have paired together to write a title sequence song for the remake which is called ‘Never Too Late’. The song is performed with him as the lead singer (obviously) and an African choir backing him up.
Elton had stated early last year that he had hoped to collaborate on this final song with pop queen, Beyonce who is the voice of lioness Nala. “They need to have a new end-credits song. We’ve been speaking to Beyonce’s people, and hopefully Tim and I and her can cook up something. … And it will be great to work with her. So we will see.” For some unknown reason, this never happened which is a real shame but we are sure it will be great anyway.
Despite her main talent being singing, she is only going to be singing twice throughout the musical, with one song that has been as of yet left untitled but will appear at the end of the song. It’s likely to be a solo, too, so we might be getting Princess Jasmine’s ‘Speechless’ vibes from Nala.
However, Elton was already in the running with ‘(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again’ which was another title sequence song composed by Bernie Taupin and himself to feature at the end of ‘Rocketman’ (2019), his biopic. He performs this with Taron Egerton who portrayed him throughout the musical.