The 1989 song Billy Joel never wanted to sing: “Sometimes you just can’t get through to people”
Never for a second did Billy Joel think that he was going to be a rock star when he first started playing.
Every single rock band out at the time may have had piano players, but if you look at the massive singers that had come and gone throughout history at that point, was there really anyone thinking that Joel was going to be the next Jim Morrison or Robert Plant whenever he sang? He definitely wasn’t cut out for that kind of musical future, but even he thought that some of his greatest songs weren’t necessarily cut out for him either.
Because as much as Joel can write a catchy tune, he has always been somewhat dismissive about his own voice. He had tried to sound like someone different on every album, and while that led to some unintentional hilarity when Cold Spring Harbor came out sounding so wrong, he was still looking to try out different spaces in his voice whenever he was singing one of his tunes. Half the time, he wanted to sound like Ray Charles anyway, but there was no limit to where he could go once he got his bearings.
He was never afraid to sound like everyone from Franki Valli to Jimi Hendrix whenever he sang his songs, but every single time, he ended up sounding like something completely different. Sure, Charles could have sang a song like ‘New York State of Mind’ beautifully, but when you listen to the kind of cadence that Joel sings it with, you can tell that he was writing the kind of love letter to his hometown in a way that no one else could.
There were a lot more genres for him to try out, but he was the first to say that he could have never stepped to the true soul giants even if he wanted. An Innocent Man was meant to be an homage to all of his favourite acts, but when you look at a song like ‘Tell Her About It’, it’s not like he was going to be giving any of the Motown heavy hitters a run for their money whenever he sang.
That’s not to say that there weren’t some soulful rock acts at all. The biggest names in funk had already started bringing rock elements into their sound, but ‘State of Grace’ seemed like the one time where Joel actually made something soulful. Storm Front was already all over the place style-wise, but when listening back to the song, Joel felt that it could have worked with someone like Daryl Hall singing the tune instead of him.
Hall and Oates were already one of the biggest names in music, so getting that soulful voice on the track would have been perfect in Joel’s mind, saying, “I wanted it to be a little ethereal. You’re talking to somebody, ‘There you go slipping into a state of grace,’ and they’re somewhere else. Sometimes you just can’t get through to people. I think of it as a song that could have been sung by Daryl Hall. He has this thing in his voice.”
If you look at what most of the songs on Storm Front are about, though, Joel was always going to be the right person to sing every tune. He had gone through one of the worst business deals that anyone had ever gone through, and after having to fire his manager, a lot of these songs are about building himself back up, whether that was him talking about his problems communicating on this tune, the boating community on ‘The Downeaster Alexa,’ and even the annoying catchy history lesson in ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’.
Joel didn’t always have to be the biggest fan of his voice, but the reason why that voice works so well is that it’s the sound of the everyman. He didn’t need to get too flashy whenever he sang, and since the melodies in his songs were absolutely perfect, there was no need to add in some massive voice like Hall on top of everything.
