The Billy Joel song he said should have never been made
It’s hard to think of any Billy Joel song being any more perfect than it already is.
There are hundreds of people who might not see his music as the most enjoyable thing in the world, and there might even be fans who downright loathe his approach to rock and roll, but every one of his melodies has been meticulously crafted to be the complete version of that song anyone would ever hear. But when you have that kind of workman-like approach to songwriting, some are going to feel more like jobs than others.
Then again, some of the best songs Joel has ever made have been when he’s working against the norms of what a pop song is supposed to be. No one would have thought about trying to make an episodic rock and roll tune like ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ at the time, nor was anyone asking for a trip into a jazz club in the middle of Manhattan during the breakdown of ‘Zanzibar’, but that’s what gives all of his albums a lot more character.
Regardless of how many times he went back to some rock and roll cliché, he was clearly a fan of everything that he was pulling from. No matter how many times he listened to someone like Beethoven, the fact that he thought enough of him to include one of his melodies in the middle of ‘This Night’ was practically a love letter to the music that helped him through his teenage years.
That said, Joel could admit when he wasn’t trying all that hard, either. He has gone on record saying that ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ is one of the worst melodies that he ever put together, but if anyone is a history buff, it’s hard to call it a bad song on the surface. There’s a bit of charm with how he structures everything, so by definition, it can’t be considered the worst if it still has some merit to it.
No, the worst Joel songs are the ones where he is spinning his wheels, and that came more than a few times during his career. The Bridge was his least inspired record up to that point, but even with Storm Front helping him get back up on his feet, putting out a song like ‘When In Rome’ was never going to work. The idea was already a bit clumsy, but Joel felt that the final product didn’t deliver on the potential it did have.
For all of the tunes that he had in his arsenal, Joel eventually singled out ‘When In Rome’ as one of the least inspired tracks he ever made, saying, “It’s a cliché: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ It’s one of my crappy songs. I wish I could take that one back. When I’m home, all it’s gotta be is me and you, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Wow, how profound. I think I was just tapped out ideas when I wrote that one.”
At the same time, it might have had a shot if it had been put anywhere else on the album. The running order of any record is extremely important when getting the right vibe for what it should be, but since the next song on the record was ‘And So It Goes’, which Joel picked as one of the all-time great tunes that he ever wrote, it just makes his decision to include this tune on the record look even worse.
But even if this was towards the bottom end of his favourites, the fact that he ended up bowing out from music after one more album was an incredible display of growth on his part. He knew that he didn’t need to be making music because he had to, and getting the chance to get by playing all of his hits was more than enough for him once River of Dreams came out.
