The Billy Joel songs he wouldn’t have wanted to hear: “Everybody’s allowed to have their opinion”
Billy Joel was never destined to be everyone’s favourite rock and roll artist. Even though he had a great way with words and could put together classic melodies, there are many people who either simply don’t get it or don’t care enough to listen further, but it’s not like ‘The Piano Man’ is necessarily blaming them for it, either.
After all, for every person that does like an artist, there’s a likely chance that there are people that don’t like them, either, and Joel’s discography definitely has a sound that won’t be pleasing for every situation. His melodies are perfectly pleasant and brought a sense of grandeur to pop music whenever he came out with a new record, but it’s not like he had the perfect song for every occasion in a person’s life whenever he sat behind the piano.
But Joel never really thought about being a pure pop artist that had a song for everything. He wanted to serve his muse above anything else, and while that made for a fairly solid discography, the singles were always where he started to fall flat in his early days. There was no way to avoid an album like The Stranger if you tried, but Joel’s best moments are usually pieces that people have to look a little harder to understand.
Let’s take an album like 52nd Street, for instance. Songs like ‘My Life’ and ‘Big Shot’ are singles for a reason, but who else in mainstream music was going to make something as ambitious as ‘Zanzibar’? There had been forward-thinking rock songs all the time, but not every artist had the ingenuity or the chops to make a tune about a jazz club and then subsequently put an interlude in the middle of the track that sounds like the soundtrack to going into that jazz club in the middle of New York.
Then again, the hits do exist for a reason, and it’s not like Joel had the best track record for picking them. There are obvious shoo-ins for his setlist like ‘Piano Man’ and even later tunes like ‘Goodnight Saigon’, but when looking back on some of his poppy material like ‘Uptown Girl’, Joel completely understood why people took one look at his music and figured it wasn’t for them.
He couldn’t blame the label for helping him get chart success, but Joel admitted that not every song he wrote is the first thing he would be itching to listen to, either, saying, “Everybody’s allowed to have their opinion. It’s okay. There may be some people who only know me from the singles. And I realized if I only knew me from ‘Tell Her About It’ and ‘Uptown Girl’ and ‘Just the Way You Are’, I might not like Billy Joel either. [But] I’ve written a lot more than that. Most of my work is under the tip of the iceberg.”
Which probably explains why one of his most famous concerts almost went over like a lead balloon. His first gigs in Moscow are among the most celebrated shows of his career, but when he first came out playing a bunch of ballads, it’s understandable why the audience practically sat down the entire and barely moved a muscle instead of trying to get into the music.
Even if Joel had some potential fans turned off the minute that his grating pop songs came on, he could rest easy knowing that he had far more in the arsenal. There’s no way to convince someone that what they don’t like is secretly brilliant, but Joel knew that no one could take songs like ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ or ‘And So It Goes’ away from him for the rest of his days.
