The best song Billy Joel ever wrote, according to Billy Joel
Nathaniel Hawthorne once said: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Billy Joel might argue the same point about ‘easy listening’ music.
Joel’s songs have an air of seamlessness about them. They don’t ask for much from you other than to lend your ear. But he has always found that breezy quality a hard thing to achieve. This made it all the more surprising when he returned with ‘Turn The Lights Back On’ after an almost 20-year absence back in 2024.
Within no time following the release, he performed at the Grammys that same year. So, it’s hardly like he has just tentatively wandered back into the frame. ‘Why now?’ many have been asking, and the piano man has been responding, “I don’t know, it just all came together now, so, I just said, ‘Why not?'”
This has also given the star time to reflect on his career to date. Thusly, when E News asked him to name his definitive, all-time favourite Billy Joel anthem, he thankfully avoided the pretentious route of saying ‘Turn The Lights Back On’ or that he hasn’t written it yet, and without hesitation offered up the classic, ‘And So It Goes‘.
In the past, Joel has cited the 1989 track from his album Storm Front as his least-appreciated song. He refers to it as the one the casual fans don’t seem to know, but any ardent followers will join him in recognising its heartfelt power. Strangely, Joel might have thought some of this force had abated for a while as he had actually written the song back in 1983 following a break-up with Elle McPherson, but it wasn’t deemed appropriate for An Innocent Man.
I suppose it’s only natural for a break-up with McPherson to prompt a man to have a good long think about things. Understandably, Joel became pensive.
Thereafter, he sat on the song for over half a decade, tinkering with its constitution until he was finally ready to release the non-hit he’s most proud of. This is, of course, indicative of Joel as a songwriter. There are countless unreleased melodies he has come up with over the years, but he’s not prepared to put them out if he thinks he hasn’t optimised them. In essence, just because you’ve written ‘something’ doesn’t make it a song, let alone worth releasing.
“I tend to put off the writing part as long as I can,” he once said in a press conference. “It can be a grind,” he then told Howard Stern. “Sometimes I look at the piano, and it is this big, black beast with 88 teeth that wants to bite my fingers off.” Given the mental health struggles he faced earlier in his career, once checking himself “into a nut house”, this is rather understandable.
Joel, with trademark honesty, continues: “It doesn’t always come to you like a bolt out of the blue. You don’t always get that Promethean moment like I did with ‘New York State of Mind’. The worst thing about songwriting is the struggle,” he said. “I love having written, I hate writing.”
This, it would seem, is also his secret weapon. He refuses to yield to that frustration and succumb to formulas or flimsy platitudes. If he’s releasing it, then it means he has given it the gold stamp of personal meaning. And maybe that’s why he holds ‘And So It Goes’ so dear: even after a difficult six years, he kept a tight hold on it.
