The artist Billy Joel thinks holds up after 200 years
Only a handful of artists have created a singular musical vision quite like Billy Joel. Although he may have never been the coolest artist to admit to enjoying, Joel’s knack for writing hooks was only matched by his lovable demeanour every time he took to the stage, always coming off as a regular guy who happened to have music as his full-time job. While Joel may have millions of influences over the years, he can credit this artist with starting it all for him.
When talking about his love of music, Joel initially gravitated towards the sound of artists like Ray Charles, being fascinated with how he could blend the sounds of soul and country music on albums like Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Once he heard The Beatles play on The Ed Sullivan Show, though, Joel knew that he wanted to make the audience move in the same way when putting his first bands together.
Although Joel was well-versed in every single rock band coming out in the late 1960s, he was far from one-note with his musical choices. Outside of the first rock bands he heard on the radio, Joel was introduced to classical music at an early age.
When Joel’s family first moved to the US, he remembered his father playing various classical pieces on the piano, going over any sonata he could think of. While Joel may not have known what impact the music was having on him then, he would grow appreciative of what the music was doing to his musical mind as well.
Discussing the impact of classical music, Joel thought one artist shined above every one of his favourites, saying, “My favourite composer/artist of all time is Ludwig van Beethoven. I can’t get enough of the guy. He’s so expressive. Two hundred years after he wrote this stuff, it’s still hanging around. I don’t know how many writers are around nowadays that people are going to be listening to 200 years from now.”
It’s easy to see where Joel took his stabs at trying to make his own Beethoven-inspired classics. Across his early albums, Joel would put various pieces together as if writing a classical composition, throwing together massive tapestries of notes before coming out with songs like ‘Piano Man’ and ‘Just The Way You Are’.
The biggest inspiration from Beethoven came with the release of the album An Innocent Man. Being a loving ode to the music that shaped Joel when he was growing up, the song ‘This Night’ is a direct lift of one of Beethoven’s works, only set to a swing rhythm instead of played straight to make it sound slightly different.
Releasing his final pop music album in 1993, Joel would even follow in his idol’s footsteps, writing the album Fantasies and Delusions in 2001, comprised of various classical compositions he had worked on over the years. Even though Joel may know how to crank out a phenomenal piece of music, he still bows at the altar of the greatest composer in classical music history.
