The 1986 album Billy Joel wanted to forget about: “Material I’m not proud of”
Billy Joel could usually be the harshest critic whenever it comes to some of his mainline albums.
The actual critics would have wanted nothing to do with him in the first place, but when they all pulled down all of those layers of pretension, they had to admit that there was no one else in rock and roll willing to make as many perfect tunes as he could on every single record. He was a song craftsman every single time he made a new record, but he could admit when a lot of his records suffered from having way too much filler on them.
But that’s always the gamble of being on a constant cycle, like Joel was half the time. ‘The Piano Man’ hardly ever took breaks, and even when he felt the need to tour around the world for the rest of his life, there were many times when he would become restless whenever he got back into the studio. He was going to put his all into every song he made, but things were already starting to hit a few bumps by Streetlife Serenade.
Nothing was wrong with the way that he wrote, but after having his first big hit, Joel seemed a little bit cynical of the business already. He had seen what happens when someone makes music that was a bit too cerebral for the charts, and since the label had started to whittle down songs to the shortest versions of themselves, a tune like ‘The Entertainer’ was already a clear sign that he wasn’t exactly happy with the lives that the suits had been living when he joined the label’s roster.
He could still roll with the punches, but even after going through the greatest run of albums that he could from The Stranger to The Nylon Curtain, everything seemed to be a little bit strange going into his next projects. An Innocent Man was practically a collage of him making songs that he loved to listen to when he was a kid, but even if that record was a ton of fun, the idea of him going back out on the road after having a baby with Christie Brinkley was going to be a hard bargain when making The Bridge.
And you can really hear that Joel doesn’t want to be there on a few of the tracks. He’s not exactly trying to sleepwalk his way through the record by any means, but when looking through a lot of the songs, there isn’t much on the record that seems like mandatory listening in the same way that songs like ‘Summer Highland Falls’ and ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ used to do back in the day.
The years of being on the road weren’t as attractive to him any more, and even Joel remembered that he seemed to have lost the plot a little bit, saying, “There are some not well-written songs on that record. I was in a hurry to get it over with. It was similar to Streetlife Serenade. There’s some great stuff on The Bridge, but I can also see that there’s a lot of weak material on that album that I’m not that proud of.”
Then again, any album that has Joel interacting with Ray Charles in any capacity couldn’t be terrible from top to bottom. Charles was the reason why Joel wanted to perform in the first place, and the idea of them trading lines back and forth on ‘My Baby Grand’ is one of the purest love letters to music that any musician has ever written.
But even if the rest of the album didn’t work all that well, it was just a transitional record before Joel ended up wowing us one more time when making Storm Front. The next few years leading up to his retirement weren’t meant to be fun all the time, but if Joel was going to show up in the studio, he was going to at least try to give it 100% wherever he could.
