‘A Room of Our Own’: Billy Joel’s attempt to write a John Lennon song
As the 1980s arrived, in the eyes of many The Bronx soft rock songsmith Billy Joel was still the ‘Piano Man’. While pop stardom would wait with 1983’s ‘Uptown Girl’, Joel had been rocking the adult-contemporary world with a string of acclaimed piano balladry records that wrestled stirring vignettes of suburban drama from the same blue-collar well of American dreams and turmoil as the heartland rockers dominating the charts around him. It proved a winner, thrusting Joel to one of the day’s biggest stars.
Soaking up some of the new wave’s taut aggression on 1980’s Glass Houses, a streak of cynicism and sardonic lyricism began to rear its head. Waning optimism would only be tested further later that year with John Lennon’s violent assassination in New York, rocking the music world and thrusting the unnerving phenomena of the celebrity stalker to the fore of the public consciousness.
One artist hit deeply by Lennon’s murder was Joel. A lifelong Beatles fan and admirer of the Lennon-McCartney songbook, Joel inexorably channelled his anguish and dismay into 1982’s The Nylon Curtain.
Crafting an album packed with synthesisers and string and horn sections, Joel scores President Ronald Reagan’s ebb of the American dream enjoyed by the working class of yesteryear with a subtle bite of angsty drama behind the pop and soul numbers. One cut that takes a lighter detour is ‘A Room of Our Own’.
Rumoured to serve as an exasperated lyrical vent from his failing relationship with manager Elizabeth Weber, Joel pens a black-comic snapshot of an odd couple driven to turmoil over the little differences that would balloon were it not for the simple sanctuary of a spare room: “But it’s alright / We’re the same even though we’re alone / It’s alright / Yes we all need a room of our own”.
“That’s one of those contrast songs, ‘you got this and I got that’,” Joel told SiriusXM in 2016. “‘A Room of Our Own’, very much influenced by John Lennon and that bitter thing he used to have…John was killed in 1980, and it shook me up, and it stayed with me. I think I was channelling John Lennon, I didn’t want him to be gone, I still wanted to hear John Lennon’s songs, I wanted to hear his voice, and even Phil Ramone [producer] pointed out to me when I was making The Nylon Curtain ‘hell you’re singing a lot like John Lennon’. I said, ‘I can’t help it.'”00
He added: “I wrote the songs thinking about John Lennon, so there was a lot of that going on in those songs.”
Joel highlights the tempo of the piece with an easy segue into The Beatles’ ‘She’s a Woman‘, a number primarily penned by Paul McCartney, but illustrative of the subconscious whirring at play in Joel’s psyche during those years. Joel would jump into shiny pop nostalgia with follow-up An Innocent Man, but it’s The Nylon Curtain that catches Joel as close to Lennon’s gift for acidic lyrical musings behind expert songcraft as he’d ever get.
