The 10 best songs by Billy Joel
Most of the greatest rock artists in the world radiate cool out of every single pore. As much as people might not care for everything The Rolling Stones put out, there’s no doubt that Keith Richards had more swagger in his little finger than most of us have in our entire body. Billy Joel was never concerned with sounding cool, but he developed his own swagger through purely being a great musician.
Throughout his career, Joel has always had a workman-like approach to rock and roll. As much as he could have just followed his muse throughout his career, every song that he ever put out was meant to outdo anything that he had done before. Whether that was his ballads or the rockers in his catalogue, every piece would be counted whenever you picked up one of his records.
Granted, there is a definite order for songs that stand above the rest. Although not every one of his songs is exactly meant to be a hit, some of his deep cuts are where the real magic is, from him breaking out his chops in genres like classical or jazz to making the one set of lyrics that rips your chest out of your chest with just a few short strokes.
Although Joel has spent years retired from writing albums in the customary format, his return with ‘Turn the Lights Back On’ has served as a reminder to the giant that still walks the Earth. Even if they might not be the coolest thing for someone to listen to, his material feels more like a part of cultural history than anything else.
10 best Billy Joel songs
10. ‘Summer Highland Falls’
In terms of Joel’s career, Turnstiles occupies a weird middle ground in his career. As much as he may have been looking to get that next big hit, his ambitious side has never reared its head as much as on this album, from the bombast of ‘New York State of Mind’ to the piano beating that he gives on ‘Prelude/Angry Young Man’. Before he had ever started combining song themes, ‘Summer Highland Falls’ was the closest he came to writing a pure rock pastiche.
Considering Joel’s career was in danger of falling by the wayside, the lyrics ring true from the perspective of someone who knows they are up against a wall. Although a line about the bad times being the only times the singer has known feels like it should be a great punk rock line, it just sounds heartbreaking coming out of Joel’s mouth, almost like he’s singing from the perspective of a cynical kid from the Bronx.
Even though the majority of the song discusses the perils of trying to find love during a rough time in life, Joel’s defeatist attitude is something that everyone experiences at one point or another. Everyone likes to have that optimistic attitude throughout their lives, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
9. ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me’
For all his credentials, it was never necessarily cool to like Billy Joel. He had chops, and there was a lot about his music that people could appreciate whenever he came on the radio, but he wasn’t exactly going to be giving the likes of Mick Jagger a run for their money or anything. The tides of rock were already shifting by the time Joel became famous, and once he saw the new kids on the block, his attempt at sounding like a weary veteran was actually a lot more convincing than many thought.
While many took Joel’s cheap shots as a mockery of what the sounds of new bands like Devo were doing, he’s actually extremely reverent of the format. Then again, it’s not like he’s not in on the joke a little bit, even admitting that he’s always been a bit out of touch when it comes to the flavours of the day.
Then again, good music knows no expiration date, and hearing the saxophone solo come screaming in is the embodiment of cool whenever it starts playing. Joel had made peace with the fact that he wasn’t going to be the Jim Morrison of his time rocking leather pants or anything, but rarely has there ever been a song that made being a square sound interesting.
8. ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’
He mightn’t like the music much himself, and it might be much maligned by many snootier folks, but it still always draws comments and drunken singalongs in equal measure. That alone is no mean feat for an anthem that weaves through the entirety of modern history, laying down a prescient point that the times are not a-changing, in such a way that has rendered the track timeless.
The song came about after Joel overheard Sean Ono Lennon in a studio talking about what a terrible time it was to be young. Joel reassured him it has always been that way and quickly rattled off a list of indictments. “I wrote the words first, which is why the music is so horrible in that song,” he later told the We Didn’t Start the Fire podcast. “I usually write the music first and then I write the lyrics, but in that song, the melody…it’s like a mosquito buzzing around your head! It’s more annoying than musical.”
However, you could argue that the mosquito motif is almost fitting for a song about how the unfurling hardships of history can’t be swatted away—you could now add a verse akin to ‘Taylor Swift, terrorists, mortgage rates and federalists, culture wars, lockdown bores, and Donald Trump’s in prison’. Timeless.
7. ‘Honesty’
Every good pianist needs their ballad to tie everything together. Granted, if you look at Joel’s catalogue, there are almost as many syrupy tracks sprinkled throughout his albums as there are uptempo rockers. That doesn’t mean that every ballad has to mean anything, and in terms of rock and roll life lessons, Joel admitted he was a bit out of his depth when writing the song ‘Honesty’.
Compared to the thousands of people who like to talk about the nature of the human condition, Joel thought that he was in no place to lecture someone about what it means to be honest. After all, everyone makes mistakes, and you end up learning from them even if you have to take shit from a lot of people for what you’ve done. Then again, that doesn’t mean these life lessons don’t still hold a little bit of water.
Considering the backdrop of the song, Joel makes a song about the underlying truths of the world feel like a dramatic stage show number, especially when he pulls the audience back down for the chorus with a chord change that seems to rival the likes of Beethoven. Joel might admit to not being the best messenger for this kind of thing, but does it really matter when you have this to show for it?
6. ‘Downeaster Alexa’
Joel isn’t far from the master of the art of ‘songs with a story’. His narrative approach imbues his ballads with a cinematic air, but notably, and to his credit, it is always indie cinema rather than a cheesy blockbuster approach that he takes. In doing so, he imbues his story songs with great depth, embellishing them with the sense that they go on beyond the confines of the track.
‘Downeaster Alexa’ is a prime example. With this anthem, Joel tackles the thorny issue of overfishing and sea pollution via the beleaguered cry of a captain struggling to sustain his family with a life on the sea. It’s a humble that he oddly, and quite bizarrely juxtaposes by singing in the most bellowing and bombastic style of his career.
The result is as strange as it is enthralling. Epic swells of simple instrumentation and an impassioned performance from Joel, makes for a piece of music that is engaging and euphoric – you live inside this song as you listen.
5. ‘Zanzibar’
Billy Joel was never meant to be a one-trick pony. Even though his distinct sound set him apart from every other New York artist, he was just as likely to throw a few curveballs into the mix when it came time for him to cut loose in the studio. By the time he worked on 52nd Street, the name of the game was all about jazz, and Joel gave us a peek into the jazzy nightlife he saw every night on ‘Zanzibar’.
For the first half of the song, this feels like the natural progression from what Joel had worked on on ‘The Stranger’, complete with the same insistent beat and the handful of guitar jabs here and there to give it some attitude. Once you settle into its groove, though, everything flips on a dime into the kind of jazzy rhythm that wouldn’t have felt that out of place on an early Miles Davis record.
Then again, is it really any shock that Joel could pull this off, given that he had already been trained in classical material before he had even started playing rock and roll? If anything, this is just good storytelling through music than anything else. The whole track was about going to this jazz club, and once the horns kick in, you’re practically hearing the sound of the bar without having to get past the doorman.
4. ‘Vienna’
For someone like Billy Joel, The Stranger is about as close to perfect as it gets. There might be songs that aren’t to your liking or overstay their welcome, but if you need the roadmap to everything that he stood for, each song on this album is a good look at what he was all about. Underneath the grandeur of every other track, Joel still had a heart, and ‘Vienna’ may be one of his most open-hearted tracks.
Whereas most of Joel’s love songs talked about two lovers trying to understand each other, this sees him talking to someone who’s lost in the world. They don’t know what to do with their lives, but Joel knows that it’s no use trying to rush your way through your life, offering them the chance to slow down for a little bit and take in what the rest of the world has to offer.
Considering this was coming from a man barely into his 30s, this is the kind of sage advice that most of us need to hear in the modern age. Many people need to get what they want as quickly as possible, but not everything has to be figured out in one moment. Vienna will always be on the horizon, so it’s better to appreciate the forest for the trees once in a while.
3. ‘And So It Goes’
Not all romances are meant to last. It might seem like you could be with this one person forever at the moment, but sometimes circumstances take life in a different direction and leave you a lot colder on the inside. Joel has had more than a few brushes with heartbreak, but ‘And So It Goes’ might be one of the more potent songs that he’s ever written surrounding the darker side of love.
Framing the song as a one-way conversation between him and his lover, Joel talks about how both of their hearts have gone in completely different directions. As much as he wants to be with her forever, he can’t be the one to make her life decisions for her, and so he’s more than happy to see his heart shatter into a million pieces if it means that she will be happy with someone else.
Joel would even consider this song one of the best he had ever written, loving the idea of the melody lingering on suspensions throughout every line to keep people uneasy. Because love can often make people do some crazy things, and when you find out that the person you care about isn’t as invested as you are, you’re left with that same incomplete feeling as the music has.
2. ‘Piano Man’
‘Piano Man’ resides in the rarified realm of songs where you couldn’t possibly imagine the world without them. These songs often don’t get the credit they deserve. They have transcended culture and entered society at large to such an extent that we take them for granted. However, much like Coca-Cola, for every nine cans you swig without savouring, there is always that one that feels like medicinal magic. ‘Piano Man’ can feel like that sometimes.
The melody is simply stunning; it is seamless and flows with perfection as Joel prises familiar chords and makes something unique with them. The meta notion of focusing on a struggling musician is a masterstroke. And the chorus is in a key that can match any voice for a bellowed singalong. ‘Piano Man’ is a song of the people.
The lyrics are descriptive and specific; you feel like you’e been in the bar in question by the end, and you know what he means about your pal John at the bar. Rarely, is such familiarity packaged with such gusto, and rarer still is when it lands with resonant eudaemonia.
1. ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’
Billy Joel stopped writing for a while; for 17 years in fact. The crux of why comes down to the fact that he wasn’t prepared to lower his standards. For him, songs have never been throwaway. He belongs to the era where everything about them comes a whole: the melody interplays with the lyrics, rhythms and key changes have implications beyond what is aurally pleasing, production is like the essence of prose in a novel, and all this culminates in something self-contained.
Creating something like that is no mean feat, and Joel was never willing to settle for anything less – he’d done it once, and once was enough. Typifying his achievements as a songwriter is ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’, Joel’s own favourite Billy Joel song. But we’re not just taking his word for it, he’s an objective man, and this anthem stands up as masterpiece by any measure without any sentimentality establishing such.
Here, he simply sits and observes life unfolding from behind a plate of Puttanesca at a restaurant around the corner from the theatre. The scene serves as a mixing bowl for society at large. Melodically, it is prosaic and grandiose by design – as is the life he sings of. Much like going to a restaurant, life is routine and predictable, until the time that it isn’t. Somehow Joel affirms that message in a matter of minutes, and its sweet, catchy and tuneful into the bargain.
