“The Champ’s Eyelashes” and the song so bad it made Billy Joel stop writing
For the best part of twenty years, Billy Joel was seemingly in possession of a bottomless bag of hits.
Finding fame with 1973’s Piano Man, the New York songsmith won the hearts of the pop-rock crowd with his lounge tales of blue-collar America, reaching stratospheric heights of fame a few years later off the back of The Strangers’ monster numbers ‘Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)‘, and ‘She’s Always a Woman’.
Joel would evolve his sound, embracing some new wave prickliness with 1980’s Glass Houses, jumping into unabashed pop nostalgia on 1983’s An Innocent Man, and closing the decade with Storm Front’s arena stomp.
It appeared his studio efforts would persist so long as he could still tinkle the ivories. While still a busy live act, scheduling shows as recently as this year and having committed to several Face to Face tours with Elton John, fans haven’t been treated to a pop record since 1993’s River of Dreams, which continued a run of phenomenally successful albums with its Billboard 200 number one. Aside from his foray into classical music with 2001’s Fantasies & Delusions, the Piano Man doesn’t show any signs of dropping a much-awaited 13th album anytime soon.
Many artists may abandon the entire recording business, but will never stop strumming a guitar or jotting down a lyric in their private lives. Yet, Joel confessed to having not even written one song in the years following his last conventional album, aside from the sketch of a song inspired by France’s most famous avenue.
Working out a stream-of-consciousness vignette concerning the ghosts of his past life, Joel anchored his contemplative piece around Paris’ Champs-Élysées, a landmark of the city’s eighth arrondissement. Not speaking a word of French, and crafting an ornate melody around the draft, a submission to his bandmates quickly punctured Joel’s confidence in the lofty number.
“I gave the band some chord charts and I wrote ‘The Champs-Elysées’ along the top,” Joel revealed to journalist Larry Katz in 1998. “My guitar player, Tommy Byrnes, who is a very irreverent guy, like my drummer, he looks at the chord sheets and goes, ‘What’s the name of this one? ‘The Champ’s Eyelashes’?’ From then on, no matter what I did, the song will forever be known as ‘The Champ’s Eyelashes’. And it might as well be called that, because the lyrics were so bad, and I realised I wasn’t even feeling what I was writing lyrically; I was more into the music. And I haven’t written any songs”.
Odd singles would follow, from 2007’s ‘All My Life’ to last year’s ‘Turn the Lights Back On’, but the blunt reception to his surrealist fancy may have scuppered an intriguing detour for his songwriting style. Crediting his then abstract painter partner, Carolyn Beegan, for his artful lyrical fancy, Joel spoke candidly about how such an approach remained fascinating to him, even if his ‘Champs-Élysées’ turned out to be a champ’s eyelashes.
“I realised this is a great concept, to be able to write in abstractions, to be able to compose something which isn’t so easily definable, something which isn’t so damn literal,” Joel stated. “I know what I’m feeling, I know what I’m saying, I know what I mean, and if somebody wants to interpret it a different way, that’s fine. If somebody doesn’t like it, hey, that’s fine too”.
