The songs Billy Joel wishes he could delete from history: “I’ve written some real stinkers”
With a career as densely rich with mega-hits as Billy Joel can boast, there are bound to be a few moments that don’t quite meet his own high standards.
Considered one of the finest songwriters of his generation, gaining admiration from some of the pop world’s finest, including Paul McCartney, Joel has delivered a ream of unforgettable moments for the music world.
The truth about Joel is that he is, by and large, vastly underrated. Slammed by pop hits like ‘Uptown Girl’, his image took a severe battering. Prior to such dull and lifeless releases, Joel was capable of being considered among the world’s best, like a latter-day Paul Simon. Unique and emotional, without ever feeling too Hallmark. It was a trick that he seemed particularly proud of, and it’s why he is so ashamed about the songs that really stink up his reputation.
The quality of songs like ‘Vienna’, ‘Moving Out’, ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’, and ‘Only the Good Die Young’ are hard to dispute. But, even with such a high bar, few were expecting Joel to claim he’d like to edit around “25%” of his back catalogue out and leave them on the cutting room floor. “I’ve written some real stinkers I wish I could take back,” he told the LA Times in 2023.
During that conversation, Joel quickly pointed out two tracks he had a particular disdain for. Selecting 1989’s Storm Front cut ‘When in Rome’ and the forgettable 1980 song ‘C’était Toi’ from Glass Houses of the same year as two particularly wretch-inducing contributions, Joel noted: “I don’t know what I was doing. Sometimes I’d get six or seven songs I thought were pretty damn good, then there’d be a couple of squeeze-outs at the end just to fill up the album.”
Ignoring the fact that “squeeze-out” is one of the most offensive terms you will read today, those two numbers will have rarely reached the upper echelons of any fan’s list of favourite songs, but Joel doesn’t reserve his regret for the forgettable moments in his catalogue. The singer is his own worst critic and is even happy to lambast some of the more popular tunes from his canon.
‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ is arguably one of Joel’s biggest hits, but it did not escape criticism. Released in 1989, the track was written in reaction to John Lennon’s son, Sean, who, alongside his friend, was lamenting that their generation had been stiffed by the former. Things kicked into overdrive for Joel’s creative mind when Lennon’s friend claimed that he’d had it easy because “everyone knows that nothing happened in the ’50s”.
The comment acted like a starting pistol, and Joel’s mind raced into gear, providing a stream-of-consciousness song that still rings out across the airwaves today. “I started with Harry Truman because in 1949, the year I was born, Harry Truman was president,” said Joel. “From there, it kind of wrote itself.”
However, perhaps because of this hands-off approach to the songwriting, Joel would later note his regrets over the song. During a Q&A, Joel bemoaned the track’s tune, saying, “When you take the melody by itself, it’s terrible”, calling it “one of the worst melodies I ever wrote”.
If there were one song that defined Billy Joel, it would be the 1973 hit ‘Piano Man’, a track that has been sung in every piano bar worldwide ever since. In such a bar, The Executive Room in Los Angeles, Joel found the foundations of the track: “It was a gig I did for about six months just to pay rent. I was living in LA and trying to get out of a bad record contract I’d signed. I worked under an assumed name, the Piano Stylings of Bill Martin, and just bullshitted my way through it.”
For Joel, the song’s popularity is a mystery as he deems it one of his worst: “I have no idea why that song became so popular. It’s like a karaoke favourite. The melody is not very good and very repetitious, while the lyrics are like limericks. I was shocked and embarrassed when it became a hit. But my songs are like my kids, and I look at that song and think: ‘My kid did pretty well'”.
It just goes to show that it doesn’t matter how talented you are, how far up the proverbial ladder your endeavour and drive can take you, there’s a very good chance you will still look back at your journey and see the turns you should have taken instead. Thankfully, Billy Joel doesn’t have the chance to delete these songs.
The Billy Joel songs Billy Joel hates:
- ‘When in Rome’
- ‘C’était Toi’
- ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’
- ‘Piano Man’
