The Song Nobody Asked For At 3AM
Elton John released "Can't Take This Feeling Out of Me" in January 1984, and it spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was written by John and his longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin, and produced by Phil Ramone. The song came off the album "Breaking Hearts," which was his eighteenth studio album and a pretty solid one, though it didn't perform nearly as well commercially as some of the stuff he'd been putting out earlier in the decade. What makes this particular track worth knowing about, if you're digging into his catalog, is that it was recorded live in the studio with minimal overdubs. Most pop productions in the mid-80s were drowning in gated reverb and drum machines by now, but this one still sounds like a band playing together. I remember when I first broke it down on a session — I was trying to recreate the vocal arrangement for a cover, and the layering on the chorus is deceptively simple. There are basically three vocal tracks panned hard left and right, with a center lead, and the harmonies sit right on top. If you try to do just two tracks, it sounds thin. You need the thickness, and it's not as expensive as it sounds to capture.
Where to Find Can T Take This Feeling Anymore
If you're looking to actually hear the track, the official versions are available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music. The song runs about four minutes and forty seconds. There's no studio instrumental officially released, so if you're looking for a karaoke version you'll need to track down a fan-made instrumental on YouTube or use a tool like Moises or Lalal.ai to isolate the stems yourself — those services have free tiers that handle basic separation well enough for demo purposes. I've had people ask me about ripping it from various sketchy download sites, and my answer is always the same: don't bother. The audio quality on most of those is terrible, often compressed from a YouTube rip that's already been through multiple generations of lossy encoding. You're better off streaming it. The difference in quality between a proper lossless stream and a shady MP3 from a random site is night and day, especially on the piano part where the high frequencies get mushy almost immediately. One thing people routinely get wrong about this song is the key. It's in E major, but the vocal sits surprisingly high for John's range. That means if you're trying to play along or arrange a cover, you either stick to the original key and hope your singer can reach those upper notes, or you transpose down to D or C major and lose some of the tension that makes the chorus hit. The bridge pulls into the relative minor and then back out again, which is where the harmonic movement gets interesting. That's the part most cover bands gloss over because it requires actual chord changes rather than just cycling the same four patterns.
If you want the sheet music, MuseScore has user-uploaded arrangements that are decent but not always accurate. Hal Leonard publishes official sheet music for it, and it's usually around twelve dollars. I'd recommend just learning it by ear if you play piano — the Voegelin method of slow practice still works here. Set the tempo to 60 percent, learn one bar at a time, and don't speed up until you can play it cleanly at slow tempo. Most people rush this and end up with sloppy playing that sounds worse than learning it properly from the start.
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