The composer Billy Joel hailed as “the greatest who ever lived”
Not every rock star enters the craft thinking that they will make the greatest melody ever heard by human ears. The genesis of rock and roll was meant to make a racket in the hopes that it could connect with people, but by the time acts like The Beatles began, it became clear that artists could manage to write something that could go to bat with everything from rock to pop to classical music. But while Billy Joel learned the tools of his trade when he started playing clubs, he knew that few people could be able to eclipse the true giants of melody in his mind.
Looking at Joel’s trajectory as a rock star, though, no one would have expected him to be one of the biggest stars of his generation. He certainly knew how to beat the hell out of his piano whenever the time called for it, but given that he wasn’t the same kind of engaging presence as Paul McCartney or Elvis Presley before him, he was more content to sit behind his keyboard and downplay some of his abilities.
Then again, that kind of self-deprecating made him more likeable to many people. It’s never fun to hear the biggest stars in the world talk about how they are one of the greatest singers to walk the Earth, and hearing Joel’s everyman persona whenever his albums came out put him in the same league as composers like Bruce Springsteen in a way, almost taking a workman’s approach to every song he wrote.
And that’s probably why there are rarely any major duds in Joel’s career. The hits are the hits for a reason, but throughout all of his albums, any song has the potential to be someone’s favourite based on how much substance is there, from the longing in ‘And So It Goes’ to the singalong fun of ‘Uptown Girl’ to the jazz pastiche that he paints in the middle of the song ‘Zanizbar’.
The reason those songs sound so well comes from the fact that Joel always looked at his songs as classical compositions before anything else. As crazy as it sounds, ‘Uptown Girl’ could justifiably be a piano invention if no one else was singing on it, and that came from Joel pouring over everything from Bach to Mozart to Brahms. Of all those composers, though, nothing came close to what Beethoven was doing.
“From early on, I felt Beethoven. I still think he is the greatest composer who ever lived. To me, he was the most human composer.”
Billy Joel
Despite some composers being better in many respects, Joel knew that what made Beethoven the best was the humanity in everything, saying, “From early on, I felt Beethoven. I still think he is the greatest composer who ever lived. To me, he was the most human composer. With Beethoven, I hear the stops and the starts and the friction and the struggles that he had when he was writing. He had to struggle. The man was deaf when he wrote most of this stuff.”
And outside of lifting one of Beethoven’s melodies on the chorus of the song ‘This Night’, Joel was a lot more crafty in sprinkling in his knowledge of his classical heroes. Every now and again, there will be the occasional lift in the track that comes from an odd chord that doesn’t fit, but Joel’s ability to bring everyone back to the main melody of the track comes from the same approach that Beethoven set for himself.
Because while anyone can be there to write a tight two-minute pop song, Joel was interested in taking people on a journey with his music. And whether it was pulling from The Beatles or quoting his favourite classical pieces, it was always about proving that music could mean something other than someone showboating or being hungry for their 15 minutes of fame. For the greatest of all time, it’s a lifestyle.
