The singer Billy Joel called a better lyricist than him: “He had that going for him”
Billy Joel wasn’t the kind of person to care about the deep idiosyncrasies of his lyrics.
The written words were half the reason why he started to resent making pop songs, and even if he did have some great imagery throughout his catalogue, it was more fun for him to concentrate on the music rather than working in an entire story around his work. Because if he was going to be competing with his contemporaries, he figured he would leave it up to those who actually had something real to say.
Then again, it’s not like Joel was a complete amateur by any stretch. A lot of his lyrics are sung the same way that he talks, and even if not all of them are the strongest material in the world, he’s at least giving people a look into his psyche. Everyone has wanted to sing along to a tune like ‘Piano Man’ or ‘Big Shot’ at some point in their lives, but when listening to the other wordsmiths out there, Joel understood that he wasn’t going to be a Bob Dylan or anything whenever he made one of his tunes.
Dylan was in a class by himself whenever he made his tracks, and while Joel could do justice to a song like ‘Make You Feel My Love’, it was more important for him to make music that he felt that he could get behind. The tune is what mattered over everything else, which probably explains why he has spent the rest of his career delivering the goods and only writing the odd piece every so often to remind people of what he could do.
‘Turn the Lights Back On’ proved that he still had it, but he was also willing to give his friends their flowers as well. Some of the best songwriters around that time were painting vivid pictures of their lives, and while Joel was no Jackson Browne when it came to making his character portraits. He was more comfortable making a few rock and roll tunes that people could sing along with, and when it came to slice-of-life stories, he knew that there was no way of comparing him and Bruce Springsteen.
‘The Boss’ was the closest thing to Dylan that Joel’s generation had, and when looking at his way with words, you can understand why. A lot of his best songs revolved around making the kind of situations that could feasibly happen, and even if Joel got dragged through the mud for being corny, he couldn’t really argue when the critics gravitated towards what Springsteen was doing.
He felt like a saviour of rock and roll, and Joel was more than happy to second to him for most people, saying, “Bruce was also a wordsmith, and critics are wordsmiths. So he had that going for him. I never resented the good press that Bruce got. He deserved it. I was just never about the words first. I wrote the music, then the words. To me, the words – sometimes I don’t give a fuck.”
In all fairness, Springsteen could get a little bit corny as well, but Joel was usually a different kind of cheesy than most people would have wanted. No one would have openly admitted that Joel changed their life in high school back in the day, but no matter how many times he got called derivative, he was willing to do whatever he could to make all of his songs sound as perfect as he possibly could.
He never apologised for trying to do a good job woodshedding his tunes, but Springsteen was a much different animal. You felt that he could take on the world with a guitar in his hand, but that didn’t mean that everyone needed to ignore the kid from Long Island who was making some of the most accomplished music of the time.
