The genre that touched Billy Joel’s heart the most: “Dragged me away and seduced me”
Billy Joel didn’t want to take the traditional route when it came to being a rock and roll star.
He knew he was never going to be an Elvis Presley figure that could stand at the lip of the stage every single night, but even from behind his piano, he was already leagues above anyone who had ever tried to put together a half-decent pop tune. He wanted to make the most of his musical upbringing, and there are still pieces of his songs that even the greatest rock and roll bands would have a hard time trying to figure out.
Because when you look at a lot of the chords behind Joel’s work, not all of them are the easiest things in the world to play. ‘Piano Man’ is fairly straightforward, all things considered, but even on a song that is as sunshine-y as ‘Uptown Girl’, there are so many pieces that feel almost avant-garde compared to the usual pop formula. The whole song changes key without even realising it half the time, and compared to every other songwriter of his time, no one used as many borrowed chords to make their point.
Most singer-songwriters wouldn’t have known what “borrowed chords” were in whatever key they were in, but even when Joel was throwing in jazzy chords and diminished runs into his work, they always suited the song perfectly. ‘New York State of Mind’ might be synonymous with ‘The Big Apple’ ever since it first came out, but the strange harmonies on the track practically put that image in everyone’s mind of the hustle and bustle that comes with going through Times Square.
That’s because Joel knows exactly what he’s doing whenever he stumbles on a chord that might sound a little bit out of place. The suspensions in his music are what keep people coming back, and even though he never set out to write a hit when he made music, what makes a song like ‘And So It Goes’ work is because of all of the unresolved tension in the song that builds up every single time one of the sections ends.
All of that came from years of him studying music, but even for someone who had been one of the greatest musical geniuses of his time, he felt that classical music was what gave him the tools of the trade. He wouldn’t have been anywhere without hearing Mozart when he was a kid, and even when looking back on his time as a hitmaker, Joel still felt that his work in classical music would tower high above anything else.
Artists like Ray Charles showed him what pure passion sounded like, but those classical pieces were what Joel was the most moved by, saying, “Classical music was the girl next door and rock and roll was this girl who smoked with fishnet stockings that dragged me away and seduced me. And we had a wild fling for about 35 years. And all of a sudden, I rediscovered the girl next door and I fell in love with her again. Classical music is where my heart is now, but I’ll always love rock and roll.”
But if you look at some of Joel’s heroes, a lot of them had the same kind of affection for classical music. Elton John had a lot more nuance behind his song because of his years of studying classical music, and even though The Beatles didn’t know the first thing about what an augmented chord was or upper extensions of chords, there were more than a few moments during the medley on Abbey Road that wouldn’t have been out of place if it were used in a symphony.
So while a lot of people can claim all they want that classical music is the kind of genre that’s reserved for the older generation, there’s nothing wrong with people gravitating towards the more sophisticated side of music every now and again. No one genre is better than the other, but classical music does a much better job at serving the kind of music that Joel wanted to play after singing ‘Piano Man’ one too many times.
