“I’d love to”: the guitarist Billy Joel always wanted to work with
Billy Joel isn’t a man who collaborates all too often.
Despite standing as one of the States’ most lauded songsmiths, Joel keeps a fairly closed shop in the studio. He lent his croon to numbers by Barbara Streisand and Tony Bennett, but otherwise, there are few cameos on Joel’s own work. He loosened up for 1986’s The Bridge, roping in Stevie Winwood to play the organ, inviting a vocal duet with Ray Charles, and even co-writing ‘Code of Silence’ with Cyndi Lauper.
But for the most part, songwriting is a solitary process for the ‘Piano Man’. How else could he pen those early hits with such a candid, personal touch with someone else’s fingerprints all over the whimsical likes of ‘Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)’ or ‘She’s Always a Woman’? Sure, he can tour with Elton John on repeat for the long-running Face to Face tour, but can such two heavyweights work on a Joel number without compromising his unmistakable lyrical pen?
Strangely, it’s his later work that’s pulled the creative drawbridges up that much higher, despite his tentative chart presence. Joel hasn’t dropped a conventional rock/pop album since 1993’s River of Dreams, 2001, seeing his foray into classical with Fantasies & Delusions, but recent singles like ‘Christmas in Fallujah’ saw Joel double up with Cass Dillon behind the mic, and even inviting a small team to help pen 2024’s ‘Turn the Lights Back On’.
No big LP project looks to be out anytime soon, however. With that, any big ideas bringing Joel’s heroes into the studio for one last album hurrah feel vanishingly thin as time moves on. Had such a record ever been cut, Joel did once reveal the artist he’d eagerly bring in for an LP or single session if he could help it.
“Sure [Eric] Clapton would be somebody I’d love to work with someday if I was recording rock ‘n’ roll,” Joel told MassLive in 2008. “But I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen again. I learned not to say ‘No, that will never happen again,’ but you never know what you’re going to do.”
Unlike Joel, Clapton is the king of collaborations. The guitar maestro had soldiered through as many as five acclaimed bands before eventually going it solo, counting himself as one of the very exclusive club of outsiders ever invited to lay down a track for The Beatles and counts credits from everybody across BB King to The Rolling Stones. Why not add a Joel number to his session CV?
Then there’s the prolificacy. Even since Joel’s classic LP, let alone rock, Clapton’s been busy, dropping a hefty eight albums, from immersions in the songbook of his beloved blues master Robert Johnson to a fully-blown Christmas record. If Joel’s serious about a collab, best offer his services to Clapton album number 23 pronto.
You can’t force these things, but with the pop smatterings in recent years, a chance to join forces with the old Cream guitarist may just induce the one final rock and roll offering fans have been waiting so long for.
