The best and worst of Billy Joel, according to Billy Joel
So much of what makes an artist into an icon comes down to experimentation. For all the leaders of music, no matter what genre circle they moved in or the scene that birthed them, the thing that unites them is innovation, pushing the boundaries of what had been done before to do something new. Billy Joel is undoubtedly counted within their ranks as he brought the piano to the world of rock and roll. But is it possible to innovate too much? Joel argues it is.
Billy Joel’s position within music history is unique and tricky to articulate. He has so many hits, and all of these seem widely and unanimously beloved. Tracks like ‘Piano Man’ and ‘Uptown Girl’ are written into the world’s songbook as uniting anthems, while others like ‘Vienna’ or ‘She’s Always A Woman’ are rightfully celebrated as examples of absolutely beautiful and moving songwriting.
However, Joel is underappreciated when it comes to innovation simply because his songs are so universally enjoyed and remain in the mainstream of music culture that the progressive flourishes within them get subsumed. They aren’t experimental in the way someone might typically expect, pushing into strange or difficult territories and daring to dip into becoming niche or less enjoyable. However, Joel’s innovation happens somewhere between his instrument and his lyricism.
His words are classic rock songs, but his piano playing has always beautifully blurred the lines between different forms and traditions. There’s some old-school honky tonk in there with the kind of playing that would be expected to be heard in some dingy pub on a beat-up piano. There’s some jazz with his intricate details and scales. There’s blues as he plays with genuine feeling. The mix of it all helped bring the instrument into the rock world, defying the need for guitars to make the grade.
As a writer, player and performer, Joel has always pushed himself but he admits that at times, not being able to rest on his laurels has led to time whereby he maybe pushed himself too far and got too adventurous.
“Eh, “Two Thousand Years,” I don’t know how crazy I am about that one,” he said in an interview with Marc Allen. “That’s a tad ambitious,” he said, “I don’t know if I succeeded on that one. It was a reach.” Nevertheless, few musicians would ever attempt to ”sum up all of the history of mankind in three verses”, at least Joel came to rue that ridiculous effort with his artistic integrity in tact.
Sitting on his album River of Dreams, the record was a clear change in tone for Joel as he attempted to use his songs to navigate bigger, darker and altogether more serious topics. He was pushing his songwriting further than he ever had, attempting to use it to articulate lofty thoughts and ideas. For ‘Two Thousand Years’, he was attempting to articulate the entire history of mankind, so it was no small feat.
However, whether he believes the song is good or not or whether it holds up amidst his golden discography, he still manages it. “Time is relentless / Only true love perseveres,” he sings, writing a love song that takes the entire existence of the world so far to make it come true. From the book of Genesis and the creation story to modern modes of poetry and science, the verses weave through the planets’ history, concluding that the only thing that unites us all is love, fate and time chugging on.
He attempted a similar feat with ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. This time, he might have nailed the concept, but he later bemoaned the track’s tune, saying, “When you take the melody by itself, it’s terrible”, calling it “one of the worst melodies I ever wrote”. Alas, it is noteworthy that only Joel could have an enormous hit with a track he rubbished as musically garbage.
Even ‘Piano Man’ follows suit in the eyes of the maestro. “I have no idea why that song became so popular. It’s like a karaoke favourite,“ he said of the anthem. “The melody is not very good and very repetitious, while the lyrics are like limericks. I was shocked and embarrassed when it became a hit. But my songs are like my kids, and I look at that song and think: ‘My kid did pretty well’”.
However, there are kids he loves more than others, his favourite of all time being ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’. Speaking about this The Stranger classic, Joel proclaimed it to be the number one Billy Joel song in his entire discography, ranking it alongside ‘Vienna’ and ‘She’s Right on Time’. It is undoubtedly a track that encapsulates the songsmith as an artist.
It is constantly trying to uphold himself to that standard that defines him as an artist. He has often cited that he prefers album tracks to singles in his back catalogue, and as fans will concur, these expansive worlds seem considered to be of the nth degree and yet effortlessly welcoming. This is not an easy art to master, and as a master of it, Joel knows that all too well. “I tend to put off the writing part as long as I can,” he once said in a press conference. “It can be a grind,” he told Howard Stern. “Sometimes I look at the piano, and it is this big, black beast with 88 teeth that wants to bite my fingers off.”
He continues: “It doesn’t always come to you like a bolt out of the blue. You don’t always get that Promethean moment like I did with ‘New York State of Mind’. The worst thing about songwriting is the struggle. I love having written, I hate writing.” This, it would seem, is also his secret weapon. He refuses to yield to that frustration and succumb to formulas or flimsy platitudes.
So, it is not without irony that the songs he loves often seem to be unheard of beyond mega-fans and those he loathes are probably playing on the radio now.
