Billy Joel on why Taylor Swift is The Beatles of a new generation: “She knows how to write”
Anyone who sets their sights on being The Beatles of their generation is already setting themselves up for failure. It’s one thing to aspire to be like them, but people only relate to an artist when they see their unique perspective through their music rather than wearing another artist’s sound like a costume half the time. Billy Joel certainly had his fair share of influences when he was cutting his teeth, but when looking at the current state of music, he thought Taylor Swift had come the closest to capturing the group’s spirit.
But every generation seems to have that one artist or group that picks up where the rock icons left off. In terms of hard rock, one could argue that Led Zeppelin were the ones to pick up the mantle for The Beatles, given both their popularity with mainstream audiences and their toying with the way they released records.
When looking at the pop sphere, the closest that fans ever got to seeing someone with that level of success was most likely Michael Jackson in the 1980s. No matter what kind of strange life he was living behind closed doors, the appeal of albums like Thriller and Bad resonated with people who didn’t even need to necessarily like R&B music to enjoy it.
Whereas Nirvana started to pave the way for another movement just as big as Jackson, Swift has been using every one of her songs to her advantage now. While she would probably tell fans that she’s more influenced by someone like Carole King than The Beatles from a public figure perspective, it can’t be denied that Swift has at least equalled the Fab Four in terms of her fanbase.
Outside of being one of the biggest pop stars in the world, she deserves at least some credit for changing the way that people look at consuming albums. From the various ‘Taylor’s Version’ reissues that she has made, this is a roundabout way of using The Beatles’ model for doing things no one else could do.
Even if Joel wasn’t the biggest fan of what she was doing, he could at least acknowledge that Swift was as close as the modern era was going to get to another Beatles, telling USA Today, “Taylor Swift is a very talented girl, and she’s productive and keeps coming up with great concepts and songs, and she’s huge. You have to give her high marks. She knows music, and she knows how to write. She’s like that generation’s Beatles.”
Swift may have reached the popularity level that The Beatles did in their prime. Still, Joel was more interested in the way that the group used different musical innovations throughout their career. If you listen to the way that he constructs melodies, Joel is more inclined to make the kind of creative leaps that would have been found on an album like Abbey Road, like when he combined different song fragments together for ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’.
Joel does have a healthy respect for all flavours of popular music, but what Taylor Swift is doing spoke to something more than just a simple pop song. Much like the Fab Four, Swift knows that with the right set of lyrics or that one great melody, artists have the potential to relate to their fans in a way that very few people can.
