“There’s nowhere to go with it”: the song Billy Joel that sounded too redundant
Every artist who has been around for a while is in danger of plagiarising themselves a little bit. The fans might not be able to tell the difference sometimes, but whenever someone puts out a new record after their long run of classics, it’s usually easier to see the different tropes that make them such an iconic songwriter by the repeated lines of musical motifs that sound a little too familiar. However, people like Billy Joel can also find that kind of problem happening within the span of one song.
Then again, Joel has always been insanely critical of his work. He had always equated writing songs to pulling teeth half the time, but since most of his songs are fully fleshed out by the time that they hit the airwaves, there’s hardly any piece of his catalogue that could have been cut for being filler or of lesser quality than all of his other records.
That’s not to say there aren’t some dogs amongst the classics in Joel’s eyes. He has gone on record numerous times saying that he hates having to go through every verse of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ for such a lacklustre chorus, and he ended up hating the mix of Cold Spring Harbor so much that he ended up chucking it into the middle of the street the minute he heard the final version.
But sometimes those records are necessary if you want to appreciate the classics again. Some people can spend their entire lives chasing after that one song that got famous, but when looking at Joel’s body of work, it’s okay to shuffle through something like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ if it meant getting records as beautiful as ‘Scenes From An Italian Restaurant’ or ‘Vienna’.
“They’d be playing it as a musical piece, and it gets very redundant.”
Billy Joel
Of all the tunes in his catalogue, though, ‘Piano Man’ might be the most agreeable song he ever wrote. There’s already a certain stigma around Joel’s music as being a bit too soft for people, but listening to him go through this tune is the kind of slice-of-life tune anyone can enjoy. Or at least it is in the moment. When Joel got up from the piano, though, he realised that the tune was far less complex than he thought.
When discussing the musicians he’s come across in his off-time, he remembered getting tired of them playing the tune, saying, “They’d be playing it as a musical piece, and it gets very redundant. And it starts to dawn on them that there’s nowhere to go with it. And I’m sitting there biting my nails, saying, ‘It’s a really redundant melody. When’s he going to pick something else?’”.
It is redundant, sure, but there are pieces of redundant melodies that can be somewhat evergreen. No one was expecting John Lennon to make something complex when writing a tune like ‘Give Peace A Chance’, and since it is so simple, it’s easy for people to sing along to, whether they’re listening to it in a bar or are completely wasted in the middle of one of his concerts.
Admittedly, it might seem a little bit strange to have the song reach the heights that it has when far more complex tunes like ‘Zanzibar’ get left by the wayside, but that’s how the rules of pop music go. There might be something that any artist would have been proud to have written, but it always comes back to whether the tune is actually catchy.
