Billy Joel’s songwriting secret: “I hate writing”
Nathaniel Hawthorne once said: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” Billy Joel might argue the same point about easy listening music. His songs have an air of seamlessness about them. However, this knack can be surmised in a meta nod to the craft by one of his contemporaries, Paul Simon: “And a song I was writing is left undone, I don’t know why I spend my time, Writing songs I can’t believe, With words that tear and strain to rhyme.”
The beautiful irony of Simon’s verse in ‘Kathy’s Song’ is that it almost ridicules what he’s saying, thanks to how perfectly his bemoaning fits the melody. Far from straining, there isn’t a single word out of place. This is also the beauty of Joel’s songwriting. He has often cited that he prefers the album tracks to the singles in his back catalogue, and as fans will concur, these expansive worlds seem considered to the nth degree and yet effortlessly welcoming.
This is not an easy art to master, and as a master of it, Joel knows that all too well. “I tend to put off the writing part as long as I can,” he once said in a press conference. “It can be a grind,” he told Howard Stern. “Sometimes I look at the piano, and it is this big, black beast with 88 teeth that wants to bite my fingers off.”
He continues: “It doesn’t always come to you like a bolt out of the blue. You don’t always get that Promethean moment like I did with ‘New York State of Mind’. The worst thing about songwriting is the struggle. I love having written, I hate writing.” This, it would seem, is also his secret weapon. He refuses to yield to that frustration and succumb to formulas or flimsy platitudes.
In facing up the bleakness of a blank page and wanting to express nothing but originality upon it, he allows himself the time to concoct a genuine concept. Perhaps one of the finest examples of this, paradoxically, is both a song he hates and one that came to him in a hurry: ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire‘. This song arose after Sean Ono Lennon was in the same studio as Joel, and the 40-year-old ‘Vienna’ writer heard him say that it was a “terrible time” to be a young person. Joel insisted it wasn’t much better when he was 21. He vowed to make a musical journey through history, listing off a cornucopia of hardships that have cropped up perpetually through recent history.
Now, even that brainwave that came to Joel in 20 minutes and he has since all but disavowed as “terrible”, still has the backbone of a brilliant concept, and it was meticulously put together like an approved history textbook. These are the nuggets that Joel always strives for — songs that capture something true and present it with innovative originality.
If songs arrived easily to him, as they might given his musicological skill, then we may well have had more half-baked four-chord songs about hand-holding, and Joel may well have had more hits that stopped masterpieces like The Stranger charting at a measly 181 in the album rankings, but he is happy to wait for something worthwhile. As the journalist Red Smith once said about writing (often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway): “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”
So, perhaps Joel’s struggle is exactly why his songs have a literary depth and considered edge.
