“It’s kind of a backwards beat”: the 1989 song Billy Joel struggled to record
When you listen to how effortlessly Billy Joel sings and plays his best-known songs, it’s hard to imagine that he ever had trouble putting a tune together.
Whether it’s a piano ballad that muses on the meaning of life, like ‘Vienna’, or the wildly different-sounding but just as easy-to-him upbeat tempo of ‘Uptown Girl’, you never get the sense that Joel is battling with his muse. Whether a memorable melody or a life-affirming lyric, at times, it can seem like Billy Joel is the complete songwriter.
But, as easy as it appears, the hits may have come to him, but that has not always been the case. “It’s agony,” he told the Los Angeles Times about his songwriting process in 1993. “It’s hell. I get cranky and moody. I get in this strange state. I even dream a lot of the music. I wake up and recall bits and pieces of stuff. That triggers other ideas. I slowly put it all together. It’s like pulling teeth.”
That frustration helps explain why Joel has often spoken about songwriting as something closer to a compulsion than a profession. While listeners hear polished melodies and effortless hooks, he has consistently described the process as slow, uncertain and emotionally draining, with songs only revealing themselves after weeks or months of refinement.
Considering the agony that songwriting causes him, it’s no wonder that Joel hasn’t released a new rock album since 1993 and has consistently ruled out a return to the studio for a long-form project. “You have to have a certain amount of ambition to want to do all that” he has said.
He continued, “And I look back at the guy who was the recording artist, this Billy Joel guy, and I think, ‘Who the fuck was that guy?’ He was very ambitious, very driven, and I don’t feel like that anymore.” But in 1989, Billy Joel, the ambitious recording artist, was still alive and well, and he was still pushing through the agony to write new songs and to write new classics for which he’d forever be remembered.
Displaying the full range of genres, styles, sounds, lyrical themes and tempos that he’d utilised throughout his career, Joel’s chart-topping 1989 album Storm Front features songs as diverse as the rowdy ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, ‘I Go to Extremes’, heartbreaking ballad, ‘And So It Goes’ and the folk-epic ‘The Downeaster Alexa’. The album was as rich and textural as anything he’d ever released, and reminded the world why he was such a singular voice in popular music.
Though the album was a success, as all his albums had been, Joel later acknowledged that the work had not been without its difficulties, with one song giving him trouble in particular. Not with the writing, which was normal, but with the recording this time, on ‘The Downeaster Alexa’, and specifically in mastering the beat that propels the song onwards. A political piece about the struggles and issues of the commercial fishermen from the east end of Long Island, NY, the track has an appropriately sea-shanty, folk-style feel to it. Joel had been inspired to write the song to champion the workers who were losing their jobs to big business, and who were being muscled out of the only lives they’d ever known.
“The downbeat on that song is on the one and the three”, Joel explained during an interview to promote the Billy Joel: The Complete Albums Collection box set. “Most downbeats in rock and roll is on two and four. It’s kind of a backwards beat, but that really made it more of a folk song like you would be hitting a kettle drum, rather than a rock and roll drum set. It was hard to do.”
Although he was still nominally talking about this one song, Joel then explained something that stands true for all of his greatest works. Concluding, “The reason it was successful is because it doesn’t sound like it was hard to do. The better things are the ones that were actually more complex than they seemed. You shouldn’t hear the seams and the bolts and the rivets. You should just hear something that sounded like it came effortlessly and naturally.” Clearly, this attitude is what defines his music, if not the process of it.
Perhaps that is Billy Joel’s greatest gift as a songwriter. However difficult the process may have been behind closed doors, the finished songs rarely betray the struggle. Whether writing intimate piano ballads or socially conscious narratives like ‘The Downeaster Alexa’, Joel has always managed to hide the craftsmanship beneath melodies that sound as though they simply existed all along.
