“Making up his own words”: The erotic original draft of Billy Joel’s song ‘Honesty’
Billy Joel is arguably the best songwriter in the world. When you can tour the planet with an alternating setlist and know that fans will leave satisfied every night because your quality is consistent throughout your discography, you must develop an element of smugness. Well, this doesn’t seem to have occurred with Joel, as even now, decades after his first single was released, he still takes his time and ponders over everything he writes.
Joel seems to understand completely how powerful music can be. He creates music that speaks to people on a deep level. Whether he writes about love, loss, or the hopeless passing of time, he does so in a way that feels as though it has been taken from your subconscious.
This understanding doubles as both a help and a hindrance. It’s a help because it means that he puts his heart and soul into everything that he writes. It’s a hindrance because it means that he is putting too much pressure on himself as a writer and subsequently finds himself struggling to arrive at the finished product quite frequently.
He has spoken frequently in the past about how hard he finds it to write the lyrics to some songs. “I tend to put off the writing part as long as I can […] It can be a grind,” he said during a talk with Howard Stern, “Sometimes I look at the piano, and it is this big, black beast with 88 teeth that wants to bite my fingers off.”
Joel also acknowledged that there had been occasional tracks that came to him right away, but it’s much more common for writing songs to be a laborious process. “It doesn’t always come to you like a bolt out of the blue. You don’t always get that Promethean moment like I did with ‘New York State of Mind’,” he said, “The worst thing about songwriting is the struggle. I love having written, I hate writing.”
While Joel might find the process frustrating sometimes, he hasn’t changed it because it has led to so many great songs. However, with his song ‘Honesty’, his drummer managed to find a secret way to force Joel into finishing the track. As Joel had the melody but hadn’t finished the lyrics, his drummer knew it was going to be a great song and decided to make up his own lyrics intentionally to annoy Joel.
“I never wrote the lyrics so the emphasis to write the final lyric on that was, again, my drummer, Liberty DeVito,” said Joel, “He started making up his own words […] ‘Sodomy, it’s such a lonely world’,” Joel giggled as he told people about these lyrics which grew so frustrating they forced him to finish writing the song. “This is how things get written. Just as a matter of necessity, to stop him from saying that I wrote the final lyrics.”
