I saw Elton John at Madison Square Garden in 2012. Fourteen years later, I could no longer reconstruct the exact order of the songs or every detail of that night, but I remember the feeling perfectly. There are artists we admire from a distance, and there are those who seem to have been part of our entire lives. Elton belongs to the second group. It is impossible not to love him.

This Monday, September 7, he returns to Brazil to perform on Rock in Rio’s Main Stage. It will be his only concert in the country and his first visit in nearly a decade: he was last here in April 2017, when he performed in Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and São Paulo. Having already appeared at the festival in 2011 and 2015, this will be his third Rock in Rio performance and the first time he is the main act closing the night.

His return may cause some confusion. After all, hadn’t Elton John retired? Yes and no.

In July 2023, he brought the monumental Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour to an end in Stockholm, after five years and 330 concerts. It marked the end of major tours, not the end of music — and certainly not the end of Elton John. At 79, after spending decades crossing continents and performing more than a hundred shows a year, he decided to leave life on the road behind to spend more time with his husband, David Furnish, and their two sons. He never promised that he would not return to the stage for special occasions.

Rock in Rio is one of those exceptions — and also a kind of emotional reparation. Brazil was left off the farewell tour, and Elton admitted that he felt he had disappointed his Brazilian fans. He accepted the invitation because he wanted to make up for that absence. It is not exactly a return from retirement. It is the goodbye he felt he still owed us.

Although the word “goodbye” also seems strange when applied to Elton John. He stopped touring, but continued composing, recording and collaborating with artists from other generations. In 2025, he released the album Who Believes in Angels? with Brandi Carlile and has already completed another record. Retirement, then, did not mean silence. It simply meant reclaiming the right to decide when, where and why he would return to the stage.

He has been a professional musician for 64 years, counting from 1962, when the teenage Reginald Dwight joined the band Bluesology. His partnership with Bernie Taupin, one of the most important and enduring in music history, began in 1967. His first solo album arrived in 1969. Since then, he has survived changing fashions, excess, addiction, personal crises, transformations within the music industry and even the experience of turning himself into a character.

Perhaps that is why Rocketman remains, for me, one of the best musical biopics of recent years. The film understood that Elton John’s story could not be told as though his were an ordinary life. Instead of arranging his history as a succession of dates, albums and greatest hits, it turns trauma, loneliness, sex, addiction, fame and survival into a musical fantasy.

Taron Egerton does not merely attempt to imitate him. He sings, dances and discovers the lonely little boy hiding behind the enormous glasses, platform shoes, feathers and colossal personality. The film does not canonize Elton or try to absolve him. It shows his cruelty, his excesses and his ability to hurt both others and himself. But it also understands that all that extravagance began as a means of survival.

Reginald Dwight created Elton John before the world could tell him that there was no place for someone like him. He invented a figure larger, more colorful and more courageous than he felt himself to be. The fantasy did not conceal his truth: it was how he learned to reveal it.

That is what makes him so easy to love. It is not only the songs that have accompanied decades of weddings, breakups, celebrations, funerals, and moments we did not yet realize we would remember forever. There is a vulnerability in him that never entirely disappeared, no matter how spectacular the costume. Behind the star, Elton always allowed us to see the man who desperately needed to be loved.

When I saw him at Madison Square Garden in 2012, Elton John was already a legend. Today, 14 years later, he returns to Brazil having achieved something perhaps even rarer: the right to have absolutely nothing left to prove and still sit down at the piano to give us one more night.

The tours have ended. Thankfully, the music has not. And some goodbyes exist only so that we can say, once again, how much we will miss someone who is still here.