The 1983 album Billy Joel enjoyed more than any other: “I had a great time”
Getting Billy Joel to write a song these days is practically fighting an unwinnable battle half the time.
‘The Piano Man’ is more than happy with the songs that he has written, but the idea of him going back into the studio and coming out with an entire record of new tunes is enough for him to break out into a cold sweat if he ever had to do it again. He felt much more comfortable celebrating his back catalogue over the years, but that didn’t mean that every single song he wrote needed to be absolutely miserable whenever he went into the studio.
That said, Joel did have those few songs where he found it excruciating trying to finish them up. ‘Code of Silence’ would have still been a draft if Cyndi Lauper hadn’t come in to help him with a few of the lyrics, and while he did have a lot of love for everything that ended up on an album like The Nylon Curtain, he did feel like he left a piece of himself on that record once he finished the post-production process.
But once the 1980s got underway, Curtain was practically a wave goodbye to one phase of his career. He was entering the MTV generation, and while he seemed like the last person on Earth to be a starlet in a video or anything, he was a natural when he did practice a handful of dance steps. It would have been awful for him to try and follow trends, so the next phase of his career was going to be a celebration of everything that he loved as a kid.
There are already a handful of songs in his back catalogue that are love letters to bands like The Beatles or singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, but Joel was in a much different time of his life now. He was madly in love with Christie Brinkley, and having gone through some of the biggest albums of his career, An Innocent Man was the first time he could have some real fun in the studio. Every song was a different homage to his idols, and what’s even crazier is the fact that many of the tunes managed to chart.
Because when you look at those hits, ‘Uptown Girl’ isn’t really a song that was meant to be an 1980s smash or anything. Joel was writing tributes to everyone from The Four Seasons to Wilson Pickett to the old doo-wop groups that he loved as a kid, but the reason why all of them seem to work is because you can hear the band having fun. No one would have guessed ‘For the Longest Time’ would be a hit, but Joel couldn’t hide the fact that he was having fun working all over again.
A handful of his earlier albums had been a headache to get finished, but he stood by the fact that An Innocent Man was one of the best times he ever had, saying, “I felt like a teenager all over again. The material was coming so easily and so quickly and I was having so much fun doing it. I was reliving my youth. I had a great time making this recording. I was writing most of it in the studio and it wasn’t about having hit records. That’s where I was at.”
And it’s a good thing that Joel was having fun, because the next few albums weren’t going to be a good time by any stretch. He was already having trouble with coming up with material on The Bridge after having a daughter, but since his manager was stealing money from him behind his back, a lot of the internal problems he was having turned up more than a few times on his next records, to the point where he had had enough after finishing up River of Dreams.
There were no doubt going to be a few critics that tore him apart for daring to have fun on any of his songs, but An Innocent Man is about more than just a couple of great tracks. Much of the high-brow set of critics can talk about him being too trite, but even if you claim that Joel is nothing but a cornball musician that makes cheesy pop tunes, you can’t say that he doesn’t know what he was doing when going through every single genre he could think of.
