“It wasn’t to have hit records”: Billy Joel on the most fun he had making an album
Billy Joel really doesn’t need to worry when it comes to making hits – he’s mastered the art by now. From ballads like ‘She’s Always a Woman’ to pop anthems like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, he’s got all bases covered in the realm of musical world domination – and he’s not stopping anytime soon. As glittering a career as he’s managed, however, it’s probably fair to say that not every song or era would have been an easy ride for Joel, hence making the allowance for some fun along the way even more important.
In fact, the Piano Man claims that the album he had the most fun making was actually one borne out of a period of real turbulence in his personal life. He had recently split from his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, and experiencing single life in the spotlight for the first time, Joel decided he needed to taste the freedoms of youth once more. He dated a lot of women – most notably Christie Brinkley, who he would later marry – and the sonic result of his self-admittedly “teenage” lifestyle was the album An Innocent Man, released in 1983.
Joel’s happy-go-lucky streak reminded him of those halcyon days, he recalled, as he “remembered all those songs from the early 1960s, R&B songs, the Four Seasons, Motown and soul music – that’s how I felt. You don’t fight what you’re gonna write; you write what you’re feeling!” he explained, rooting the record firmly in a space of joy and liberation which he clearly was in no mood to suppress.
In that sense, being tasked with writing upbeat bangers when you’re on top of the world yourself was no real hardship. He continued: “The material was coming so easily and so quickly, and I was having so much fun doing it [that] I was kind of reliving my youth. I just had fun. I had a great time making this record.”
Those songs were odes to the myriad of formative musical influences he had cited from the period he was delving back into, from ‘Easy Money’ which he said was “a sort of James Brown, Wilson Pickett, R&B track that I sang live with the rest of the band. It was so much fun. The rest of [the songs] came real fast. I think within six weeks, I had written most of the material on the album.”
It just shows that sometimes the best things come when you take the pressure off them. You wouldn’t think a smash hit like ‘Uptown Girl’, one of Joel’s most enduring sonic legacies, would have been created in such a short timeframe alongside all the other songs that made An Innocent Man such a chart-topping success. But “it wasn’t to have hit records,” Joel insisted. “Who would have figured songs that sounded like the late ’50s, early ‘60s acapella records would be a hit in the ‘80s? But they were.”
Who’d have thought – making happy music does actually lift your mood. Maybe we should all try it sometime. But Joel is bang on the money when it comes to why the sound of An Innocent Man truly works. It’s just oozing with the joy of the era and the music we wish we could get back to.
