Elton John’s next album will feature cover art by famed photographer David LaChapelle, Page Six has learned.
“I just got the call and I am already blabbing about,” LaChapelle told Page Six during an interview for his latest exhibition, “Happy Together” at Visu Contemporary in Miami, Fla.
John recently revealed at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center — during the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction of his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin — that the duo just finished their latest project.
The album “is going to surprise the s— out of you,” John said. “It’s absolutely wonderful, and it’s full of youth, and it’s full of vitality.”
The “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” singer has been all the rage yet again after recent hits with Dua Lipa and Britney Spears.
While no contracts have been signed, LaChapelle is excited to get down to work.
He’s had a long history with the “Rocket Man” crooner: They most recently worked together on the tour imagery for John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” gigs from 2018 till last year.
LaChapelle — who has shot iconic images of David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Michael Jackson, Spears, Pam Anderson, Kanye West and many more — first worked with John when he photographed him for a 1998 cover of Interview magazine.
John, 76, has always had special meaning for LaChapelle, 60, who tells Page Six that he grew up with “his posters all over my bedroom.”
“This period in fourth grade we lived in North Carolina,” LaChapelle recalled to us, saying he, “felt like such a freak and weirdo.” He added of the time, “Bible belt, gay, I was Christian, but they were condemning gay people… in fifth grade I started going through puberty. I didn’t feel like I fit in, or was going to be accepted.”
But he says John, as a rock icon, “showed me there was a place for me in the world… he was a big, important figure to me as a kid.”
The pair became friends during their Interview shoot, and LaChapelle later created cover art for John’s “One Night Only” album in 2000. Then in 2004, he made stage projections for John’s residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, called, “The Red Piano.”
“He said I could do whatever I want, and gave me full creative control,’ LaChapelle recalls. “He said, ‘just go do it.’”
For the forthcoming album, LaChapelle will listen to the music to “get inspired.”
He says he thinks about “my pictures in the past… so it’s not repetitive or derivative. I like to do things fresh, and in the vein of that person and that song.”
LaChapelle’s new gallery show in Miami displays his work through the decades starting with the ’80s.
“I remember how I was at 21 — in NYC, in the East Village — and what a utopia it was until AIDS happened,” he remembered, name-dropping some of the greats on the art scene at the time including Jean Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. “I realized at the time it was a perfect place, the epicenter of the art world. I was idealistic.”
Today, “I feel full circle,” LaChapelle tells us. “I have come back to that mindset. I still feel how important art is. How it does effect change, and how people negatively and positively respond to pictures in popular culture.”
LaChapelle has also done album covers for Dolly Parton, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey and Keith Richards, to name a few.