The intricate cover art was designed by pop artist Alan Aldridge, drawing fantastic imagery from the Renaissance painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. The 2006 album The Captain & the Kid is the sequel, and continues the autobiography where Captain Fantastic leaves off. "There's not one song on it that's less than incredible," Dudgeon said. The album's producer was quoted in Elizabeth Rosenthal's His Song, an exhaustive detailed accounting of nearly all John's recorded work, as saying he thought Captain Fantastic was the best the band and Elton had ever played, lauded their vocal work, and soundly praised Elton and Bernie's songwriting. Producer Gus Dudgeon was apparently also very satisfied with the results. As opposed to the rather quick, almost factory-like process of writing and recording an album in a matter of a few days or at most a couple of weeks (as with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), the team spent the better part of a month off the road at Caribou Ranch Studios working on the recordings. John, Taupin and the band laboured harder and longer on the album than perhaps any previous record they'd ever done to that point. Captain Fantastic was written from start to finish in running order, as a kind of story about coming to terms with failure-or trying desperately not to be one. We did have songs such as 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' which is one of the best songs that Bernie and I have ever written together, but whether a song like that could be a single these days, since it's six minutes long, is questionable. In a 2006 interview with Cameron Crowe, John said, "I've always thought that Captain Fantastic was probably my finest album because it wasn't commercial in any way. It was viewed by Rolling Stone writer Jon Landau as the best track on the album: "As long as Elton John can bring forth one performance per album on the order of 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight', the chance remains that he will become something more than the great entertainer he already is and go on to make a lasting contribution to rock." The "Someone" refers to Long John Baldry, who convinced him to break off the engagement rather than ruin his music career for an unhappy marriage. " Someone Saved My Life Tonight", the only single released from the album (and a number 4 hit on the US Pop Singles chart), is a semi-autobiographical story about John's disastrous engagement to Linda Woodrow, and his related 1968 suicide attempt. John composed the music on a ship voyage from the UK to New York. The lyrics and accompanying photo booklet are infused with a specific sense of place and time that would otherwise be rare in John's music. Written, according to lyricist Bernie Taupin, in chronological order, Captain Fantastic is a concept album that gives an autobiographical glimpse at the struggles John (Captain Fantastic) and Taupin (the Brown Dirt Cowboy) had in the early years of their musical careers in London (from 1967 to 1969), leading up to John's eventual breakthrough in 1970.