The song Billy Joel called one of his “favourite recordings of all time”
There’s nothing better than being exposed to a song that alters your brain chemistry the first time you hear it, and Billy Joel is the sort of artist who will have been able to provide this for listeners around the world.
On a personal level, hearing songs like ‘My Life’ and ‘Piano Man’ were game-changing songs that opened my ears to melodies that felt impossible to comprehend before, but on the other end of the spectrum, he was also responsible for ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, a song that I’ve had a significant aversion to for years. Despite this atrocity, there is no denying that Joel had a major talent for producing tracks that were capable of lasting for decades.
However, even though he’s a fantastic songwriter in his own right, his inspirations would have to have come from somewhere, and he would undoubtedly have had some of his own experiences with songs that changed his perception of how to approach his own work.
Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, there would have been plenty of new innovations in popular music that he would have been able to learn from and incorporate into his own formative songwriting experiments, and one song in particular has stuck with him since its original release in 1964 and remained one of his favourite recordings of all time.
Speaking during a 2016 interview on a SiriusXM radio show, Joel claimed that the production and performances on one particular song were so mindblowing that he felt the need to pursue this exact sound.
“One of my favourite recordings of all time is the Phil Spector recording of The Righteous Brothers’ ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’,” he claimed in the interview. “There was an atmosphere in that song, with that big wall of sound that they got with those two guys singing was magic. They’re both singing and doing harmonies.”
While the song itself would be special on its own with its chord progressions, outstanding vocal performances and harmonies, it’s undoubtedly the work of Spector that brings the song to life with his innovative production techniques that were continually inspiring other artists of the era. The likes of Brian Wilson and George Martin, despite being brilliant producers in their own right, were still looking towards Spector as a source of inspiration.
Similarly, Joel would have looked towards Spector for inspiration, but not necessarily for his production techniques. His songwriting chops were also leagues ahead of many of his contemporaries, and the sheer volume of work that he produced meant that his work in the ‘60s ended up providing the backbone for what artists in the subsequent decades were doing.
There may have been some dreadful iterations of the song in years since, such as the infamous appearance of actor Paul Shane on Pebble Mill at One, where he overperformed every line of the track with verve, but it remains the sort of track that has an everlasting effect on listeners when performed true to the original version.
