“Nightmare”: the 1989 album that almost retired Billy Joel
For more people, Billy Joel is famous for two things: ‘Piano Man’, the 1973 hit sung endlessly in karaoke bars around the world,, and the tumultuous lawsuit against his former manager and brother-in-law, Frank Weber, in 1989.
Though the high-profile lawsuit would eventually be settled out of court, Joel couldn’t escape feeling egregiously stabbed in the back. He had, as many men would, kept it in the family and trusted the godfather to his daughter to balance his books. And what did he get in return? Betrayal. Bankruptcy. Belligerent media coverage.
However, the one (and probably only) happy consequence of the entire ordeal was that Joel had some bloody good material to work with. It’s an accepted truth that the happier an artist, the worse their art. This, of course, is outrageously toxic, in equating suffering with sales, suggesting that happiness is too boring for mass consumption.
And yet, we all know what it feels like to be moved to creation once overwhelmingly sour feelings take hold; very rarely is one moved to write a notes app poem about what a lovely, content day they’ve had. For all his sins, Joel knew this to be true.
In an interview, Joel explained that the album came about “when I found out all this stuff was going on and fired my manager and sued people left and right… It was a real nightmare, but it made for good material.”
“This was trauma, you know, this was drama. And that’s why the album ended up being called Storm Front: there’s a storm front coming, it’s going to hit the fan, and boom, it sure did.”
Billy Joel
No matter how emotionally rich the album is, the act of extracting all of that trauma, and thereby acknowledging its weight in his mind, almost spelt the end for the star. You can hear it across the entire body of work – in his words, “This storm blows through the entire album, it builds and gets more turbulent and gets more intense…”
Behind ‘Piano Man’, another of Joel’s most well-known tracks is the dizzying ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. Lyrically, the whirlwind offering showcases an impressive historical knowledge, as it catalogues a list of historical trends and cultural touchstones from Joel’s birth year, 1949, up to 1989, but if we sit with the song’s energy for a while, we can feel the cartwheels of a man teetering toward the edge, like a car flying down the side of a mountain with no working brakes.
Still, Joel reassured fans that he’d persist despite the rocky weather the best way her could: one final song that represented “the calm after the storm”, in the older song, ‘And So It Goes’, which he’d been looking to place for a while. The track, with a folkish percussion segment, charts his doomed relationship with model Elle Macpherson, and peaked at number 37 on the US Billboard 100.
Everything around me is doomed, Joel tells us on the track, but still I sing. What else could we ask of the guy?
