The one Billy Joel album inspired by a Beatle: “I wanted to hear his voice”
Rock music, at least for the majority of its life in the collective consciousness, has always been about being cooler than cool. Billy Joel might well be one of the most successful pop acts of all time, but he has always been on the fringes of being cool.
Even though many people could probably hum a few bars of a song like ‘Piano Man’ or ‘Uptown Girl’, you won’t earn yourself any cool points if you end up blaring them out in the middle of a house party. His is a particular style made for quiet appreciation and perhaps the odd lonesome car journey screaming your favourite tune into the steering wheel. Joel was never concerned with being cool.
He wrote songs straight from the heart, inspired not by the pursuit of brilliance or some kind of pyramid of perfunctory interpretation that meant one act was somehow hipper than another. Joel just wrote songs from the heart. He was a student of music, and John Lennon was his teacher when making the album The Nylon Curtain.
For any songwriter who has come out in the past 50 years, chances are they have stolen a little bit from ‘The Intellectual Beatle,’ whether they knew it or not. Whereas Bob Dylan may have been the master of lyrics during the 1960s, Lennon’s blend of lyrics and melody is the kind of combo that only comes once every generation, especially with his signature nasal voice singing songs like ‘Imagine’.
Although Joel had always internalised the sounds of The Beatles, his musical palette was always broader than the Fab Four. Going through his albums, such as The Stranger and 52nd St, you can hear him taking bits and pieces from genres like jazz and classical music, including a little jazz break in the middle of his song, ‘Zanzibar’.
After flirting with rock and roll on Glass Houses, The Nylon Curtain was marred by Lennon’s death during its recording. While Joel has never admitted that he made the album as a reaction to Lennon’s death specifically, he admitted that he changed up his singing just a little bit to fit his hero’s style.
When discussing the album later, Joel remembered even his longtime producer Phil Ramone noticed him changing up his style just a little bit, saying, “I think I was channeling John Lennon. I didn’t want him to be gone. I still wanted to hear John Lennon’s songs, I wanted to hear his voice. Even [Phil] pointed out to me while I was making The Nylon Curtain album, ‘You’re singing a lot like John Lennon.’ And I said, ‘I can’t help it. I wrote the songs thinking about John Lennon’”.
While there’s not a song on this album that comes even close to capturing the spirit of Lennon, Joel at least does an admirable job putting a Beatle-esque twist on his melodies. Songs like ‘Allentown’ are serviceable pop tunes, and ‘Pressure’ feels like a leftover from Glass Houses, but how do you classify a song like ‘Goodnight Saigon’, a massive ballad talking about the problems facing US veterans after The Vietnam War?
This is Joel’s version of putting a spotlight the same way Lennon did when he made his political material like ‘Power to the People’. The textures on the songs also have a little in common with Lennon’s classic style, including pieces of reverb on the vocal tracks and the lavish sounds of the closer ‘Where’s The Orchestra?’.
If anything, this experiment with emulating different artists may have been prepping the gears for Joel’s turn towards An Innocent Man. Whereas Lennon may have influenced an entire album, Joel took the time to write an album where each song was a tribute to his youth, whether it was the sounds of Motown, Beethoven, or Franki Valli. Joel may not be in the same conversation as other musical chameleons like David Bowie, but he could still change lanes whenever he wanted to.
