“Creatively bankrupt”: The album Billy Joel refused to release
What an icon creates in the studio is never up to the fans to decide. No matter how much someone wants their favourite acts to start playing music that sounds like their greatest hits, there comes a point where everyone wants to start exploring and move out of the realm of three chords or traditional love songs and heartache songs. Although Billy Joel never claimed to be anything more than a singer-songwriter, he knew that making one kind of album was not something he could bring himself to do.
That said, it’s not that hard to distinguish Joel’s music from every other artist in the world. Even though he has tried to improve on his craft even up to the 2020s with ‘Turn the Lights Back On’, everyone can normally hear that earnest baritone and a few music nerd quirks in the tunes that make him a seasoned pro alongside the likes of Elton John.
It’s not like he doesn’t know how to switch things up, either. The Stranger may still be his most indicative body of work, but 52nd Street saw him moving towards jazz, Glass Houses is one of the more dorky ways anyone has tried on the sound of new wave, and An Innocent Man is practically a love letter to every song that made Joel fall in love with music when he started putting together his first melodies.
If you want to etch yourself into the fabric of music, though, it’s worth it to write some sort of Christmas song. It might seem hokey trying to write about the changing of the seasons and putting the trees up, but Michael Buble will still be playing arenas every December until the end of time for that reason and is also why Mariah Carey will continue her reign of terror for the foreseeable future.
While Joel wrote the song ‘She’s Right On Time’ about the Christmas season, it’s not exactly a Christmas song. Sure, the stockings are hung in the music video, and the pianist is sitting by a fireplace, but the whole song is about how his relationship fell through, leaving him alone to pick up the pieces of what happened.
Joel even said that he was pushed to turn the song into a Yuletide carol but felt that it wasn’t right, saying, “[A Christmas album is] the last refuge of the creatively bankrupt. But I did want to write a song about the holiday season, about the spirit of it. “I used these two people who are having a relationship, ‘She’s Right On Time.’ It’s a reunion between people, which makes the season cheerier.”
Despite Joel baulking at the idea of writing a Christmas album, this does at least paint a vivid picture of what the holiday season can be like for lonely people around the world. Though people talk about spending time together with their families and trying their best to make sure everyone’s happy during the holiday season, just as many wonder how to soothe their broken hearts when the trees go up.
So, in essence, ‘She’s Right on Time’ is to Christmas pop songs what Die Hard is to Christmas movies. Both of them use the genre as a bit of a costume, but once people bother to listen to or watch them for more than three seconds, they realise what they really got themselves into.
