I was reading an interview some years back with Maynard on the then forthcoming Emotive, A Perfect Circles cover album, released on the U.S. Election day 2004. They were talking about some of the song selections and why he'd chosen to rearrange the songs they way he did, which was one of the strong features to the project (rearrangements).
They'd asked, because its all but obligatory, what songs they'd not chosen and one of the songs he really focused on was Elton John's Border Song. To finish my point with the interview, he said the arrangement was so ingrained with the song he found it pretty difficult to "make the song his own" (whatever that means). But beyond that, it made me go dig up the song and since that first listen its never been a song I've been too far away from.
If you've not heard it, its nothing ostensibly amazing. It sounds like it was written in the 1970's (it was) and its political position isn't something you haven't read on the bumper of the car in front of you, but I think what makes it so great to me, and this isn't far removed from Maynard's point, is that John knows how to make an arrangement fit with a song. More directly, the song tends to be a perfect unit where notes are neither wasted nor movements lacking full musical expression.
Now if you're only mildly familiar with Elton's work, you're probably aware of what i'm getting at here, but whats most phenomenal with this song is that it isn't one of the more enduring works he's produced, and yet 40 years after it was introduced to the major markets its enduring. Its ware shows its years, but its beauty still exists, like a classical piece that remains timeless because it was perfect for its period.
I'm always trying to understand music in a way that allows me to know it from all angles. There was a time, for example, that I saw songs as some sort of video game code you didn't so much as learn as you did memorize. While I've come along was from that point, songs like Border Song still hold tremendous power for me, because their simplicity will always remind me of what skeleton works best for these musical frameworks; saying it directly, and playing only what supports that simplicity, and just seeing where you come out on the other end.
Chris Cornell was asked once what song he wished he'd written, and he said at the time (around the inception of Audioslave) that it was Karma Police, because it was so simple we all should have thought of it. (that's a heavy paraphrase). With simple songs, they don't sound amazing, they just sound like they've always been. As if it was pulled from the collective conscious and reintroduced to a forgetful public.