The song Billy Joel regretted even attempting: “No response”
When you look at all the weird and wonderful things he’s achieved throughout his career, you realise that Billy Joel really is a jack of all trades.
Joel’s abilities and accomplishments could only ever come from someone with a deep, enduring passion for music, not just in terms of basic listening experience, but as something that takes you on a real, spiritual journey, because after all, one of the reasons why Joel became such an international treasure was just that: he knew how to use his own experiences to make people feel.
He also allowed his music to bleed everything he’s ever loved, from 1960s rock icons like The Beatles to classical composers such as Beethoven, and among all of them, there’s a common theme with emotion and storytelling, one that Joel often tries to replicate in his own work. Beethoven, for instance, is someone Joel relates to because they both work “backwards”, writing the music first and then the lyrics. He also sees Beethoven as one of the messiest geniuses there ever was, with his humanity coming through in his music, while other composers like Mozart were, in Joel’s words, “almost inhuman”.
With Beethoven, Joel especially loved the way he could sense his “struggle” while composing and how his perfectionism would often get in the way of progress. Whenever he studied his manuscripts, he loved stumbling upon ones with scribbles or scratched-out music, as they revealed the more human side to the mastermind who stressed relentlessly for perfectionism.
Joel has discussed this before – how certain classical music tells stories with rich, human nuances, pulling in a modern listener despite living in a different place and time. Much of Joel’s music achieves the same. You don’t have to come from a certain background to appreciate a piece like ‘Piano Man’; the themes of wistful loneliness and yearning still land, even if you don’t immediately connect with the immediate contexts of American consciousness or culture.
These are all the same reasons why Joel initially connected with the Fab Four – he wasn’t turned off by the fact that they were from Liverpool or that their image differed from everybody else’s. Instead, he was endeared by the fact that they seemed to Joel like “regular guys that you would have hung out with”, or like-minded artists whose backgrounds were never a barrier to resonating with the masses.
Because of all these influences, Joel has never shied away from pushing boundaries in his own music, whether it’s venturing out into more traditional classical territories or other styles people wouldn’t consider his area of expertise – in his view, he doesn’t have one, because his approach and vision are constantly changing, shifting with whatever takes him in the moment.
He does get it wrong occasionally, though. It takes guts to take as many risks as Joel has, and it takes even more to take said risks while knowing the potential consequences, which is precisely what happened with his French-speaking song, ‘C’était Toi (You Were the One)’, from his seventh album, Glass Houses. Joel was more ambitious than usual for this one, mainly because, at the crux of it, he couldn’t speak French.
As he explained to Rolling Stone, he’d gone out on stage one night, ready to perform the song, thinking his audience was about to be charmed beyond their wildest dreams. However, what he faced instead were nothing but blank faces and “no response”, barring “a few random claps”. After, he asked someone what the deal was, only to be told that they were confused because they thought he was “singing in Polish”. A rough response, but one he decided to learn from, especially when tackling styles he knows he should probably leave well enough alone.
