“I wanted to be home”: The album Billy Joel never wanted to make
Billy Joel always seemed to approach rock and roll like any other job. Although most people think that life in the limelight is all about dating Hollywood starlets and swigging booze left and right, Joel was more than happy to clock into the studio and perform any song that he could to the best of his ability. Everyone could admire that kind of work ethic, but there came one moment when Joel would have rather been anywhere else but in a recording studio.
Granted, Joel always felt at home when following his muse. Some of his best moments came from not playing to what the critics wanted, and even despite being dead in the water for a while, The Stranger worked because it captured something genuinely human in between its grooves.
And looking at where he went from there, Joel sought to make the studio his personal playground whenever he made a record. 52nd Street started off taking elements from jazz, and when he realised that none of them were going to go over well in stadiums, he started making the grand singalongs that made up Glass Houses, whether that was ‘You May Be Right’ or ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me’.
Even by his standards for fantastic sonics, The Nylon Curtain is still one of his finer projects. He had already envisioned making his answer to Sgt Pepper, and now that all the groundwork had been laid, tunes like ‘Goodnight Saigon’ and ‘Pressure’ may as well have been his answer to the other studio technicians of the world who wanted to make something that got people to turn their heads.
After making something that engaging, though, there comes a moment when you need a break, and Joel had a damn good reason to want off the road. His daughter had been born when it was time for him to make another album, and while The Bridge may have kept up the momentum with tracks like ‘Running On Ice’ and ‘A Matter of Trust’, there was no way that Joel was going to be able to put his heart and soul into everything.
When talking about the album later, Joel said that the majority of the time working on that album was spent looking at the clock waiting for everything to be over, saying, “I wanted to be home, and I hear in the writing on The Bridge a certain reluctance to continue… I was in a hurry to get it over with.”
And considering this is the only album that has a co-write on any of his albums, the Cyndi Lauper feature on ‘Code of Silence’ felt like a case of Joel wanting to get the song done instead of making something authentic. Still, no one can really stay mad at an album that manages to get Joel and Ray Charles together on the same track, ‘Baby Grand’.
There are still pieces of Joel’s signature personality on the record, but there are still pieces of The Bridge that feel half-finished. If you take one listen to how he felt about his daughter on ‘Lullabye’ off River of Dreams, you’ll know exactly why he felt trapped in a musical prison not being there for his daughter.
