The one songwriter Billy Joel said “can’t write a bad melody”
Listening to Billy Joel tends to feel like listening to music from centuries ago. Although he may have secured his start in the 1970s opposite singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Joel’s knack for creating melodies feels indebted to people like Duke Ellington from the way he crafts the perfect marriage of lyric and musical passage. While there are plenty of influences from the golden age of songwriting, Billy Joel’s taste for rock and roll gravitated towards the British Invasion.
As Joel practised on his own in his native New York, The Beatles were honing their craft half a world away. Slaving away in the Liverpool circuit playing their warped version of rock and roll, the songwriting team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney pumped out one classic after another, from the puppy love of ‘From Me To You’ to the epic brilliance of ‘A Day in The Life’.
While both men worked off each other brilliantly, McCartney would be the one focused on the melody. Since Lennon was the less proficient musician on guitar, his strong suit was how he would approach writing songs, being influenced by contemporaries like Bob Dylan to write scathing indictments of society on tracks like ‘Revolution’.
On the other side of the coin, McCartney could practically make any song work with the right melody behind it, either creating character portraits on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or making the fiercest rock and roll ever conceived on ‘Helter Skelter’. Though Joel wouldn’t claim to have the gruffness of McCartney’s heaviest songs, he still puts him in the upper echelon of songwriters.
When talking about his influence after the fact, Joel thought that McCartney was one of the kings of modern melody construction, telling Stereogum: “He’s an extremely musical guy. It’s in his bones. He can’t write a bad melody, even if sometimes the lyrics aren’t everything you’d hope they’d be. I don’t care. I’m essentially a music guy, and if I hear a good piece of music, lyrics aren’t as important to me. It’s all about melody, chord structure, and performance.”
Then again, Joel also knew the importance of the people behind the scenes that McCartney’s melodies work so well. While he mentioned that his favourite Beatles song was ‘Yesterday’, he had loads of praise for producer George Martin for the track, thinking that it benefited more from the arrangement than anything that McCartney played.
Joel would eventually compare McCartney’s song of longing for days gone by to classical composers, recalling: “To hear, all the sudden, one solo voice and one solo guitar with a plaintive melody — almost baroque type of music, not like Bach, but like Scarlatti. Very simple, very profound. It just cut through everything else.”
Considering both composers’ pop flair, it’s no surprise that both of them ended up making different turns in the classical world as well. As the 1990s came to a close, McCartney would work on various classic pieces starting with The Liverpool Concerto before making a turn towards ballet in Ocean’s Kingdom. Although Macca would release new pop music as well, Joel’s final studio album featured various classical works arranged for solo piano.
McCartney and Joel would eventually become friendly as well, retiring from the venue Shea Stadium in the 2010s together for a singalong of ‘Let It Be’. Although Joel has enough classics under his belt to compete with any classic rocker, there’s no beating what McCartney has already achieved in his mind.
