The 1970s singer Bruce Springsteen called the best songwriter: “Built like the Rock of Gibraltar”
Bruce Springsteen didn’t sign up for rock and roll to become yet another singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar.
There had been more than enough people who were trying their hand at making the best tunes that they could whenever they sat down with a guitar and a pad of paper, but it wasn’t about trying to write a few cheap dance songs. He wanted to make music that shook people up the same way that he saw Bob Dylan shake people up, and he felt that some artists were gifted with the kind of knack for making some of the greatest rock and roll portraits ever created.
But it should be said that Dylan had his own separate path as a folk songwriter. He had studied under some of the best in the world, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and ‘The Boss’ was more than happy to follow Dylan’s lead when he was sculpting his own masterpieces. We wouldn’t have had ‘Born to Run’ without ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ coming first, but the early 1970s was the golden age for a different breed of writer out there in the wild.
The folk scene had given way to the singer-songwriter scene, and everyone was looking to songs to tell them stories about real people. Springsteen already had the market cornered on his own tales of New Jersey, but he could still see when someone was knocking it out of the park when he heard Jackson Browne or re-evaluating what Paul McCartney was doing with Wings years after the fact.
When talking about the greatest songwriters of all time, though, there’s a dividing line when it comes to Billy Joel’s music. While some supposed intellectuals will claim that the man has only written one or two kinds of songs during his lifetime, the truth is that most people couldn’t accurately pigeonhole what he was doing half the time. He was trying to make music that lit a fire in people like Beethoven lit a fire in him, and that meant changing his signature groove every chance he got.
There’s the Stranger era that everyone likes to talk about as his absolute prime, but there are more creative masterpieces on nearly every other album that he put out since that record. Most people might just think he was some schmuck with a piano when they heard ‘Piano Man’ for the first time, but some of the greatest moments of his career are when he’s painting a picture of what his music sounds like. Yes, there are the soppy ballads like ‘Just the Way You Are’, but there’s no way to really describe the kind of music in a song like ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ or the piano bar that you can practically smell in the mid-section of ‘Zanzibar’.
Springsteen got to know Joel as a friend before anything else, but the more that he listened to his music, he started to realise how well-structured all of his songs were compared to everyone else, saying, “Billy’s songs are built like the Rock of Gibraltar. They are simply incredibly well put together. And one of Billy’s gifts was his ability as the great storyteller.” And that shows in the kind of diverse opinions that everyone has on the guy.
While there are some that still claim that he’s derivative and corny to a certain degree, the fact that so many people can walk away from his music with completely different favourite songs is a testament to how great he sounds. There are the acknowledged masterpieces, but there are also tunes that would have been good enough to be another classic for some other no-name band like ‘Summer Highland Falls’ or ‘The Entertainer’.
Not all of them were destined to be the greatest tunes in the world or anything like that, but the craftsmanship is what sets him apart from the rest of the world half the time. He doesn’t need to be considered one of the most popular artists in the world, but when it comes to the legacy he has, Joel is only one notch below Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney when looking at artists that are rock and roll’s answer to Bach or Beethoven.
