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When Sir Elton John had an operation on his throat a few years ago, they told him it was likely he'd never sing again. This turned out not to happen, but the incisions on his vocal cords changed the range of his voice considerably. No longer can he do the falsetto notes that were a distinctive feature of his early work, but they have given him a lot more presence lower down, and removed the slightly buzzy aspect. I'm not sure if it helps to describe it, but to me, where his old voice felt like a dropped consonant, his new voice feels like a “wh” sound: not at all plummy, but full-throated.

Unlike other singers whose voice has changed with time, Sir John has changed his style to cope with it. Whereas hearing a recording of Meat Loaf on stage in 2004 was quite painful, because he doesn't have the power he once did but still tries to perform in the same intense way, hearing Sir John sing his old numbers live provides a new perspective on familiar works. He's more than happy to sing down an octave and let his backing singers go high to take up the slack, and he's done a good job of arranging his earlier numbers to fit his new voice.

Of course, his musical writing style has changed too. I don't know whether the fascination with country music came before or after, but his new range, with its nicely rounded low notes (without any cannibal tone or straining) suits that genre well, and his last few albums have adopted a lot from it, in both lyrical and melodic content.

This has annoyed some of his fans, who want a return to the old days that can never come. I'm not one of them. I like all three of Sir John's musical styles: the twiddles and high, sustained notes of the early days; the thumping left-hand chords and over-production of the nineties; and the slightly folksy, introspective ballads of the last few years. If musicians didn't develop over time they would be dull.

My favourite example of this latest style is on the album ‘The Captain & The Kid’, and it is the song ‘The Bridge’. It is just him singing, and playing the piano, with a bit of echo added for depth, and one or two subtle touches of digital processing. The structure is straightforward — short piano intro, stanza, refrain, stanza, refrain, bridge (no pun intended) piano solo (with choir “aahs”), refrain with more urgency, repeat of last line, twiddly piano outro with final spread chord — the only slightly unusual feature is how the first verse leads into the stanza.

The tune is quite different from his musicals, but it is clearly one of his. It draws heavily on the traditional piano accompaniment to ‘Morning Has Broken’, but the melody is completely new. The song offers several opportunities to show off his recently acquired depth of tone, and he really projects the notes all the way through, modulated only by the carefully placed accents (which have an edge to them, like he is going into overdrive) and the sense of goading he manages to get in when sings of how the bridge calls to people to tempt them to seek their fortunes.

It's quite a listenable-to song, and Bernie Taupin's lyrics, as ever, provide it with enough text to fill its 3:38 length. But it has one shortcoming, one flaw in Sir John's voice that, with all his composing ability, he has been unable to disguise: his lungs aren't what they used to be. He has to take a breath at least every bar and a half. This means that the run-ons between lines are often cut off — sounding like superfluous commas on the lyric sheet — and the held notes the song is crying out for cut off, sharply enough rather than fading or scooping, but still too soon. Even without thinking about my breath placement, I can breathe in better places than this.

It's a sad failing, not so much because of the contrast between this and the notable lung capacity of his youth, but because it is the one jarring thing left. As a performer, Sir John has managed to come through a potentially career-ending illness, with new and interesting qualities to his voice which I don't think he's yet fully revealed. He's borrowed from a traditional genre almost completely alien to his old writing style, and brought the two influences together into something worthwhile, and has come out with something that respects how his capabilities have changed. But there's this one aspect of change that he hasn't quite managed to adapt to cleanly, and by being such a good song in other ways, ‘The Bridge’ shows this up.