“Got it Wrong”: The album Billy Joel lost his faith making
Try as anyone might, it’s impossible to separate art from the life of the artist. Every creation reflects its context, no matter how much someone tries to leave it out. Sometimes it sneaks in subtly; other times, it’s the whole reason for making the work in the first place. Even the artist may not realise how much of their world has filtered in—until they step back and see it clearly, like Billy Joel looking back at one record and seeing nothing but a dark cloud.
Creativity and inspiration remain mysteries. There is no science to truly explain how they work, where they come from, or why they happen. Instead, in the minds of artists, ideas seem to just emerge, landing in their brains sometimes fully formed or crawling out from a shadow with a good chorus hook, a line of a poem, or a vision of a painting in tow.
But the one thing we do know is that creativity comes from us. As ideas emerge from the deepest centre of our minds, it’s impossible to deny that, no matter what, the creator always leaves a trace on the creation. Even if a person desperately wants to leave their thoughts and world behind and focus on making something separate, they’ll find it impossible, whether they see that vividly or barely notice the whisper of themself until later.
For Joel, it was clear. Try as he might to have left his own feelings out, his 1993 album River Of Dreams was an angry one, because he was angry.
In August 1989, just before the release of his last album, Joel fired his manager, Frank Weber, who had also been his brother-in-law. He’d been keeping his career in the family, caring deeply about working with his loved ones, only to be betrayed. An audit revealed huge discrepancies in Weber’s accounting; Joel sued his ex-manager for $90million, claiming fraud and breach of fiduciary duty.
That would have hurt anyway. There have been countless musicians scorned by bad managers, and countless songs written about that fact. But ‘The Great Wall of China’, Joel’s angriest track about the situation that landed on River Of Dreams, is about more than just a bad businessman. It’s personal; he was hurt not just by a colleague, but by someone he loved and trusted.
That’s the context that coloured the whole record, and the context he hears when he listens back. “The album starts off angry because I was angry about being betrayed. Someone who I had made godfather to my child betrayed me grievously,” he said of the album.
But as always, the impact of a citation goes so far beyond the situation itself. Joel wasn’t just dealing with betrayal, but was grappling with deeper, more introspective consequences of it. The album began asking key questions: “I lost faith in my own judgement. How could I have trusted somebody that much and got it wrong?”
When making an album, trust in your judgement is the one thing an artist needs. So when it came to making River Of Dreams, an album that not only asks these questions but was made in their direct context, it became a tough process, but one he prevailed in.
