“It was too much on that”: The album Billy Joel thought was too orchestrated
Any musician can get too much in their own head when trying to finish a song. It’s one thing to capture the germ of an idea, but it’s easy for some people to write just one verse of a tune and then get stuck in some weird dead zone where they can never quite flesh out the rest of the idea. But once Billy Joel solidified everything for Cold Spring Harbor, he realised that he had overstretched himself just a little bit.
It’s no surprise why Joel wanted to be more than just a singer playing piano on his records. A lot of his best tunes just centred around him gliding across the keys, but his favourite artists were acts like The Beatles, and their use of the studio as an instrument on its own is the whole reason why bands were able to spread out a little more every time they tried something a bit more off-the-wall.
Then again, it’s hard to call any of Joel’s music truly experimental or anything. There’s the odd track that’s a bit too ambitious for traditional pop rock, but the lion’s share of his catalogue went from sophisticated pop to genre-hopping to winding up at dad rock. When he was just cutting his teeth, though, he seemed to be the perfect piano-driven successor to people like James Taylor and Carole King.
Though the album cover looks like the kind of bargain-bin record that will be playing you someone’s piano recital, Joel is still in his element on the record. ‘Tomorrow is Today’ is one of the more engaging songs he wrote about his depression, and ‘She’s Got A Way’ was the first sign that his knack for melody was far above anything than the soft rockers were putting on the charts at the time. But the piano wasn’t quite enough. It was time to break out the string sections.
It’s not even a bad choice to have a few more orchestral pieces in a record like this. Elton John had already started having more classical instruments added into the mix when he was making his masterpieces, so why not try it if you want to show the audience what you’re truly capable of?
Well, because there’s a time when artists go too far the other way, and Joel knew that by the time he worked on the song ‘The Ballad of Billy the Kid’, he wasn’t going to make the same mistakes he made on his debut, saying, “Jimmie Haskell wrote it and conducted the string section, but I told him what I wanted. I worked pretty closely with the arrangements on the Cold Spring Harbor album. It was too much on that.”
While Cold Spring Harbor already sounded incredibly thin, having the arrangements come in so clearly just made everything sound a bit cheesy. For someone who seemed to at least be on the fringes of rock and roll, a handful of tunes on his debut feel more like music that belongs in the background of a Lifetime movie these days.
But in ‘The Ballad of Billy the Kid’, the arrangements have everything one could want. The strings are tasteful, dramatic in a few spots, and most importantly, they don’t overstay their welcome after a few minutes. And given the fact that Joel would eventually move into classical compositions on Fantasies and Delusions, this was the first sign that he had a firm handle on how to arrange classical pieces just as well as he could rock songs.
