The only way Billy Joel wants to be remembered
It’s hard to define what Billy Joel brought to music most of the time.
While he was looked at as one of the guiltiest pleasures that anyone could have hoped to have during his peak years, the legacy that he’s left behind has included some of the most well-constructed songs that pop rock has to offer whenever you turn on one of his classic records. But compared to every other rock and roll songwriter, Joel had a pretty good idea of what he wanted his legacy to be before he even bowed out of the public eye.
If you’re looking purely at his albums, though, there are hardly any dents throughout his entire discography. He has often described his songwriting process as like pulling teeth a lot of the time, but most of us are happy that he went through the trouble of making some of those fantastic tunes like ‘Just the Way You Are’ on every one of his records. Because if you ask any hardcore Joel fan about their favourite song, you’re bound to get a lot of different answers based on how solid his tunes are.
It’s one thing to have a collection of hits, but even if Joel preferred the more ambitious album cuts like ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’, there are at least half a dozen songs that could have been anyone else’s masterpiece in the deep cuts. ‘Summer Highland Falls’ is absolutely beautiful, and while ‘And So It Goes’ was meant to have a few dissonant notes in almost every single chord that Joel plays, you can hear him pouring out his heart in every single second of that tune.
But when looking at his discography, Joel was the first to say that he wasn’t that good at writing lyrics. His stories are nuanced and complex, and there’s no way that the same person who wrote ‘Goodnight Saigon’ is a bad songwriter, but when you look at his track record compared to someone like Bob Dylan or even Elton John, Joel didn’t want anyone to look at him and think of the kind of social commentary he was making.
He did have a lot on his mind, but when he bowed out of pop music after River of Dreams, Joel felt that it was important for people to remember the melodies to his songs above everything else, saying, “I would like to be thought of as of that time. And to be able to transcend that time. I think that a piece of music that is written well enough can continue. I don’t even know if the lyric has to. I think if a jazz musician thirty years from now could play ‘Baby Grand,’ ‘Just the Way You Are’ or ‘New York State of Mind’ as a standard, then the music still will have a life.”
And it’s not like Joel’s music hasn’t already transcended typical rock and roll at this point. There are thousands of people who consider ‘New York State of Mind’ the official theme song for ‘The Big Apple’, and even when those songs are played as piano pieces, you can hear all of the nuance and emotion throughout the tune of a song like ‘Vienna’ or ‘Uptown Girl’ without any lyrics.
But it’s not like Joel can’t take the piss out of himself a little bit, also. He has said that ‘Piano Man’ is one of the most repetitive songs in his songbook and that there wasn’t really much to go outside of the central tune, but that only serves to reinforce how great it is. That whole song is an anthem for the everyman musician, and what’s better than having only the bare essentials whenever people sing along with it?
So while Joel has had a few songs in his catalogue that he doesn’t think are going to stand the test of time, the fact that he has made so many iconic tunes is proof that the critics didn’t know what they had on their hands with him. He might not have been the most fashionable artist in the world, but it was worth it for him to make the best songs that he knew how to and letting his fans decide which are classics.
