The Billy Joel song with one glaring mistake in it
Every single songwriter can be a bit of a perfectionist when they get into the studio. No matter how many times they might try to make the greatest song of all time, there will always be moments when they look at their classic tunes and see pieces where they could have played better or the production could have been touched up a little bit more. But even for someone as professional as Billy Joel, he knew that some accidents were good enough to keep in if it was for the right reasons.
Of all people to screw up, though, Joel was a lot more interested in getting everything perfect. He had grown up listening to some of the finest classical music blaring through his house, so if he was writing something he could call his own, he wasn’t going to spend some time winging it. He had already done that on the album Cold Spring Harbour, and since he chucked that album into the street, it’s not like he was going back to near-perfect records.
When going through some of his later work, though, there’s hardly a wasted note on any of his records. Not all of them are necessarily the coolest record in the world, but every step of the way, he was always looking to do whatever he wanted to do, whether that was working on jazz melodies on 52nd Street or embracing rock and roll and even pop on Glass Houses and An Innocent Man.
Right in the middle of his run, though, Joel knew he needed to give some songs to his label for a greatest hits album. This may have just been a simple song to throw on as a bonus track, but he ended up taking that ramshackle approach to heart when recording the song ‘You’re Only Human’.
Granted, it’s not Joel’s best song by any stretch, but the message is something that’s a lot more progressive than many people were willing to go. Coupled with the video, the song is all about talking to someone, instead of beating themselves up about things and reminding them that everyone makes mistakes. It might be as deep as one of those inspirational posters, but since bands like Queen were doing tracks as toothless as ‘Don’t Try Suicide’ at the same time, hearing Joel embrace his imperfections was a lot more refreshing.
And it’s not like Joel was hiding his imperfections, either. Towards the end of one of the verses, Joel is grooving on the song when he starts to trail off once he reaches the last line. Apparently, Joel was working on getting the proper diction on the line for a while, and since he was rolling on the verse, he ended up trying to cram all the words in at the end instead of re-recording.
The ‘Piano Man’ was initially self-conscious about his performance on the record, but his wife, Christie Brinkley, eventually convinced him to keep it as it was. Since the tune is about people’s imperfections, having a song that is a bit rough around the edges was probably the right approach rather than having every single aspect of the sound absolutely perfect.
These screwups aren’t exactly something to be proud of, but that frustration makes some of the greatest artists so endearing. After all, Joel had talked about loving Beethoven because of how much he could hear his artistic angst through his music, so this might as well have been his version of putting a little bit of a human touch into his work.
