‘A Room Of Our Own’: the Billy Joel song that wasn’t played in time
Brownies, matchsticks, velcro, and slinkies all share something in common with one of Billy Joel’s classic tracks. A mistake prompted their creation. Sometimes, we can come across the best outcome due to a misstep or error. Unplanned elements can often be exactly what was needed to place the final touches on an art piece. In this case, one of Billy Joel‘s tunes on the 1982 release, The Nylon Curtain.
Joel’s track, ‘A Room Of Our Own’, is quite the grating take on modern relationships sung to an upbeat and jovial tune. The song details a man and woman attempting to live together. Funnily enough, a dear friend’s mother posed this notion to me once before. She thought men and women weren’t really meant to live together, although, in her and her husband’s case, this was the one and only exception.
The track follows a narrative in which the pair continuously find themselves in opposition to each other. The overarching sentiment is that men and women are different, necessitating a need for separation and space lest the dreaded moment come when all the “pushin’, shovin'” comes to a head and “when lovin’ starts to come apart at the seams”.
The track pulls its musicality from a blues-infused, piano-heavy place while the incompatibilities between the two main characters are repeatedly laid out for the listener. The notion of physical separation is essentially being proposed to avoid getting on each other’s nerves. In 2016, Joel expressed “it’s one of those contrast songs”, during an interview with Sirius XM.
Detailing further, he elaborated: “You got this, and I got that, but we all end up in the same, different room. ‘A Room Of Our Own’ … it’s very much influenced by John Lennon and that bitter thing he used to have”.
The Nylon Curtain has been known to reflect the direct influence Lennon imparted to Joel. Devastated by the musician’s 1980 murder, he found himself replicating his style in an attempt to keep his spirit alive and channel the creative inspiration he felt from Lennon’s previous work. The album’s producer noted, “You’re singing a lot like John Lennon”, to which Joel replied, “I can’t help it. I wrote the songs thinking about John Lennon.”
The song’s final form truly settled into place during their recording studio session when the drummer became bewildered and started playing the notes on the inverse. Liberty DeVitto “got confused and started to play the beat backwards”.
Joel further expressed, “He was playing in time, but he suddenly turned the time signature inside out. There was a look of horror on Liberty’s face, but we could see Phil in the control room waving his arms, telling us, ‘Keep going! It sounds great!'”
Joel explained that this album took an exceptionally long time to record. Instead of following a narrative path where one would start with “a basic song and adding to it, we kind of started with the songs from the outside and worked our way in”. Joel noted that he “was experimenting playing the studio as an instrument”, allowing the mistakes that may have otherwise connoted an end point, they were rather incorporated and folded into the final piece.
