“I was gonna make a move”: The song Billy Joel called the end of an era
For an artist who’s been around for years, it’s easy to think of some albums as time capsules for certain points in their lives. Each song helps to tell the story of the person that’s standing at the microphone, and no matter how many times they might play their hits live, every songwriter has those few moments where they live inside the song for a few seconds whenever they perform. Although Billy Joel managed to create many different classics before hitting it big, he knew that he had reached the end of the line when writing one particular song.
Because looking through Joel’s discography, there’s a long stretch before he ever got recognised for being one of the greatest songwriters of his time. He was well-trained on the piano and could pick out a great melody whenever he could, but outside of ‘Piano Man’, most of his early records didn’t really interest the same kind of crowd that catered to songs by Carole King or James Taylor.
Then again, it’s not like Joel was looking to become one of the biggest stars in the world at that time, either. No matter how much he revelled at the idea of being thought of as a great songwriter like Paul McCartney, hearing him sing a song about how much the industry is terrible on ‘The Entertainer’ was probably going to do nothing for the record company who was supposed to be pushing the record.
But Turnstiles did mark a bit of a departure for Joel. He had spent time cutting his teeth with traditional songwriter tunes, but listening to how he flirts with different movements was what set him up for greater things on the horizon. ‘Prelude/Angry Young Man’ was certainly interesting, and ‘New York State of Mind’ is still one of the greatest odes to ‘The Big Apple’ ever, but ‘I’ve Loved These Days’ marked a turning point on the record.
Compared to the rest of the album, this felt like Joel looking back on the first half of his career up until that point and seeing where things ended up. Regardless of his love for that phase, it wasn’t what was paying the bills, and hearing him close that chapter of his life was almost prophetic, knowing what was to come next on The Stranger.
Still, Joel knew he needed to leave that sound behind, saying, “I was recognizing that I was at the end of a certain point in my life. I didn’t know it was going to be such a quantum leap with The Stranger album. But from ’76 to ’77 my life was taking on a trajectory that was pretty intense, and I wanted to say goodbye to the era I had come out of, which was ‘I’ve Loved These Days’… I was gonna make a move somehow, something different was gonna happen.”
Even down to the cover, Joel was already giving his audience a bit of a message. The scene of a hectic train station might look a bit foolish, but Joel’s content stare told everyone who picked the record up that he was going to move in a different direction once he did decide to hop on that train.
Despite ‘I’ve Loved These Days’ being a great lowlight from Joel’s early days, it also gives good insight into where his mind was. There was a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in those days before ‘Just The Way You Are’, but he could only look back on it in a bittersweet way, knowing that he could never go back.
