The 1993 song Billy Joel never thought he should make: “I sang it in the shower”
Billy Joel usually had a standard for what he thought a great song was supposed to be.
Even though a number of his songs could have been played as a classical piece of music and no one would have batted an eye, the entire reason why ‘The Piano Man’ used that metric was to measure whether the song was actually going to touch people better than the average pop tune. But even if he was capable of taking his music much further, he felt that some songs were never meant to have his voice on them.
If you look at Joel’s discography, though, he was capable of doing a lot more things than the traditional pop-rock music you know him for. Sure, he could make hooks for days, but when you look at every one of his albums, he did at least try to be a chameleon. The Stranger is the purest version of what he sounded like; 52nd St was much more focused on jazz, and by the time that he started walking away from music, Storm Front was closer to arena rock, thanks to Mick Jones producing.
But by the time that River of Dreams rolled around, Joel was already wondering whether or not he had said all that he wanted to. No pop star had managed to have as many hits as he did at his age, and while he was happy to make music, the idea of making songs for the charts started to feel like work more often than not. He needed to make music that he had fun making, and the title track of his last record was just what he was looking for.
Then again, Joel really seems like the last person to be delivering a gospel song like this. He had clearly studied artists like Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, who had clearly been influenced by gospel music in their prime, but aside from layering on the background singers to back him up, Joel always felt that he didn’t really belong within his own song, so much so that he tried to actively will it away.
After coming up with the idea, Joel figured that he would try to ignore the song before it was eventually forced out of him, saying, “I thought, Who the hell am I to try to pull off this gospel song? So I took a shower to wash this song away. I sang it in the shower and knew I had to do it.” And while Joel is clearly outside of his comfort zone, he’s not half bad at selling this kind of spiritual song.
The song is already about the kind of stream of consciousness that brought him to make the tune in the first place, and the idea of going walking in his sleep is something that every songwriter knows all too well. Some of the best ideas can come to people in a dream, and if Paul McCartney could fall out of the bed with ‘Yesterday’ running through his mind, Joel was certainly good enough to make his own tune like that.
If you look at it in the context of Joel’s history, though, it also makes sense that this be part of his final album. The song is practically a tribute to the time that he had creating pop songs, and while the world wasn’t going to get very many more of them, Joel spends the rest of the time checking off every box that he could, whether that’s his song to his daughter on ‘Lullabye’ or finally closing the book for good on ‘Famous Last Words’.
Retirement may have suited him fine whenever he decided to stop making pop music, but the fact that he was still taking chances this late into his career was a better picture of what Joel wanted to be. He wanted to keep pushing himself for as long as he could, and when he felt that he had gone far enough, he wasn’t going to spend the rest of the time spinning his wheels. He had already taken on gospel music, and that was enough for him.
