How Beethoven made Billy Joel leave rock and roll: “Throw off the chains of lyrics!”
Billy Joel was never meant to be the coolest rock and roll star in the world.
He always got the job done and created songs that millions of people wanted to sing along with, but there was also a streak of his career that always seemed to be moving away from the mainstream, and it only took a few listens to other genres for Joel to abandon ship entirely.
Then again, Joel was brought up on the kind of music that he heard on the radio. Every time that The Beatles came on the radio, there wasn’t anyone else standing in Joel’s shoes who didn’t want to live the lives that the Fab Four were living, and even if his ascent was a bit uneven, he was always able to come up with melodies that could stick with people for days like ‘Piano Man’.
But the hardest part for Joel was keeping up his impressive track record. He never wanted to feel like he was going through the motions, and while albums like The Bridge didn’t have the kind of musical knockout punch that he was looking for, he was always chipping away at every tune and making sure that he gave the best version of a song that he could. Not everyone necessarily likes a song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, but it’s hard to think of a better version of that song than what Joel came up with.
As he started getting into his later years, though, River of Dreams did feel like the closing of a certain chapter of his life. He had finally said all that he wanted to say, and even if the album didn’t get the greatest reception on the charts, Joel had long since stopped going out of his way to look for newer acts. Because when there’s centuries of piano music before him, it’s not like he had a lack of music he hadn’t heard.
When looking at Joel’s track record, though, it usually went back to Beethoven. While Mozart took the basics of musical theory and turned it into the sweetest symphonies known to man, Beethoven practically invented the first “hit” records. Not everyone knows Beethoven’s Fifth by name, but the minute those four notes start off the piece, it’s easy to pick up on exactly what the piece sounds like.
And for Joel, he felt writing more symphonic pieces felt more in line with how he was feeling, saying in 1998, “Look at Beethoven’s Fifth. He takes that four-note motif and turns it inside out and upside down, but it’s essentially a repetition of a four-note motif. But being Beethoven, it’s titanic the way he does it. I just did it in a small way. But it got me to continue writing those kinds of pieces. That’s really what led me to do this. Suddenly, I have no need for words. I almost feel freed, like composers of the world unite. Throw off the chains of lyrics!”
Granted, every one of Joel’s songs seemed to be leading to this anyway. Some of his most famous tunes could easily be written out for solo piano and still work fantastically well, so what’s the problem with him trying to reshape his usual method and create classical pieces with the same kind of hookiness as ‘Uptown Girl’?
While Fantasies and Delusions was among the only authentic classical pieces that he released under his own name, it’s hard not to look at Joel’s track record and hear why he wanted out of the hit parade. He could write fabulous songs, but by the time he reached the new millennium, he seemed to outgrow the entire pop charts.
