‘All My Life’: the song Billy Joel never wanted to release
Since his earliest emergence back in the early 1970s, Billy Joel has always boasted something of a Midas touch, capable of turning seemingly innocuous, unsuspecting tracks into colossal global hits, even if those particular tracks were never intended for public consumption.
There is a unique power to Joel’s songwriting which has eluded many of his contemporaries over the years. From ‘Piano Man’ through to ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, the songwriter has explored a vast array of different sounds and influences over the course of his illustrious career, but with each and every track, he seems to instil a kind of universal appeal that transcends borders and generations. Hence, tracks like ‘Piano Man’ have become cultural touchstones beloved by virtually all age groups.
Nevertheless, no songwriter – no matter how many times they have performed at Madison Square Garden – creates a track as powerful as ‘Piano Man’ on every single attempt. Indeed, by the time that the 2000s rolled around, Joel had largely retired from the musical realm, focusing almost solely on touring and doing the odd side-project rather than continuing his tireless solo output.
Still, the tirelessly artistic mind of the songwriter demanded that he return to the world of music every now and then, which is where his 1993 track ‘All My Life’ arose from. As the songwriter recalled to MassLive back in 2008, “‘All My Life’ wasn’t meant to be released at all. I was thinking Tony Bennett might do it. I was thinking of his voice singing it.”
Whether or not the song was actually ever offered to Bennett, though, remains unknown. As Joel explained, the song was originally written as a gift to his then-wife, Katie Lee, on the couple’s second anniversary. “Then we recorded it around our third anniversary,” he remembered.
Expectedly, though, the song soon ballooned beyond those humble, romantic intentions. After all, the realisation that Billy Joel was back in the recording booth multiple years after his last original work hit the airwaves was simply too great for record labels to pass up. “Columbia found out I was in the studio and wanted to put it out,” he shared.
“I thought they were crazy because it wasn’t going to get any airplay, seeing it’s kind of a standard from the ’50s,” Joel rather self-effacingly explained. “They said, ‘No, we want to put it out.’ I said, ‘Knock yourselves out.’ But it was really written from me to my wife, and that was as far as I intended it to go.” Inevitably, though, the music-buying public lapped up this surprise new material from Joel, even if it was styled on a bygone era.
When it was eventually released as a promotional single, on Valentine’s Day 2007, physical copies shifted quickly enough to put ‘All My Life’ at the top of the US Hot Singles Sales chart, as well as breaking into the lower-end of Japanese singles charts.
Contrary to Joel’s own belief, then, there was still very much an appetite for new material from the songwriter, over a decade after he had semi-retired from the industry.
