The Billy Joel song he thought he butchered: “This song really sucks”
Not every songwriter is meant to have all of the glory that the pin-up stars love. More often than not, these artists are just interested in woodshedding their craft until they come up with the next great anthem that will knock everyone on their ass once they hear it. Billy Joel may have started working on his records because there was no one else to sing his songs, but even when he hit the big time, he admitted that he was far from perfect when speaking in French on the song ‘You Were the One’.
Before becoming the ‘Piano Man’ that everyone knows today, though, there was a solid chance that Joel would have been dead in the water had The Stranger not become a massive hit. The song ‘Piano Man’ had certainly earned its place in history, but listening back to Streetlife Serenader and Turnstiles, Joel was dangerously close to being considered a one-hit wonder and banished to that dead zone where other keyboard geniuses never see the charts again like Leon Russell and Randy Newman.
And even when tracks like ‘Just the Way You Are’ and ‘Only the Good Die Young’ started climbing up the charts, he wasn’t always everyone’s first choice for a mainstream rock star. He was just another regular guy who happened to be a fantastic writer, but Glass Houses was the first time he was willing to flirt with a few new styles.
After all, 52nd Street had seen him dabble in jazz, so this would be his “new wave” album, complete with a leather jacket on ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me’. Any good rocker is only as good as their one sensitive ballad, but his choice to sing in French on ‘C’était Toi (You Were The One)’ is more than a little bit misguided.
It’s not like I don’t see where he’s coming from. Paul McCartney had proved that artists could sound incredibly suave when singing in French on an English pop tune like ‘Michelle’, but Joel’s delivery is what really doesn’t it any favours, instead sounding like the kind of guy who went through Google Translate and didn’t bother putting any affectations into the words.
The biggest blow that Joel had with the song, though, came when he went to France and threw it into the setlist, saying, “The worst thing you can do to the French is to massacre their language. The worst thing you can do to the French is to massacre their language. After the show, I asked the promoter, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘Well, they thought that you were singing in Polish.’ That’s when I said, this song really sucks.”
Then again, Joel was always better at writing fantastic melodies that went along with decent lyrics most of the time. There had been phenomenal stories in tunes like ‘Movin’ Out’ and ‘Vienna’, but one of the reasons he cited for not wanting to make new music anymore was because of just how much he hated writing lyrics.
And looking at ‘C’était Toi (You Were The One)’, it’s no wonder why Joel never seemed to touch any other languages in his music again. Still, singing with that much passion works a lot better than remaining static on one note during ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’.
