The one album Billy Joel said was never any “fun”
It’s no secret that Billy Joel was never the biggest fan of the songwriting practice.
There are plenty of songs that he looks back on with pride for having written, but judging by the huge amount of time he spent away from making new material, it’s not like making another song for the hit parade is what he’s aiming for anymore. It was already like pulling teeth at the best of times, and when the end result didn’t end up working, either, it wasn’t exactly going to be fun in the studio.
But part of the gig is slaving away until you find that one song that works perfectly with everything else. Joel prided himself on making songs that didn’t sound like anything else at the time, and while ‘Piano Man’ was a decent way of getting his foot in the door, The Stranger was an amalgamation of what had been going on for a long time. Because if you look throughout his discography, there aren’t that many outright duds.
Every song on his records was made with the intention of being better than the rest, and while the singles are the singles for a good reason, it’s not like ‘Big Shot’ is lesser in quality than ‘Scenes From An Italian Restaurant’ or ‘Zanzibar’. It was all one big body of work, but there were more than a few times when even Joel admitted that he took his foot off the gas a little too quickly.
Then again, it’s not like he wasn’t putting in the work most of the time. Even though a record like Glass Houses saw him change up his style a little bit, an album like The Nylon Curtain was supposed to take everything that he had worked up to thus far and make a record that could stand on its own like Sgt Pepper. It might not have sold as well, but it’s not like he wasn’t going for it when making tunes like ‘Goodnight Saigon’.
Right after he got back on his feet with An Innocent Man, though, it felt like he had started to lose a little bit of that fire on an album like The Bridge. There aren’t any songs that you could really call bad on the record, but compared to everything else that he had made up until that point, even Joel was content to make as much as he could and call it a day whenever he got behind the piano on this record.
‘Running On Ice’ does have a great flow to it, but Joel said that he would have rather been anywhere but at work when putting together the record, saying, “We did arena tour after arena tour, and rather than be friends like we used to be, we became business associates. People would kvetch about money, and their deal, and we weren’t close. Everybody was looking in everybody else’s pocket. On [The Bridge] album, it came to a head. We weren’t having fun; it just wasn’t fun.”
Granted, all artists end up becoming that kind of commodity every now and again, but it’s not like things had changed all that much in the music. He still sounded like Billy Joel, and anyone even marginally interested in the piano would have considered it an absolute honour to work with a guy like Ray Charles on the song ‘Baby Grand’, but outside of a few highlights, Joel seemed to be a lot more content to throw whatever he could at the wall and get back to the next tour.
In fact, a lot of the restlessness that led to Joel’s eventual retirement from recording may have started right here. He could have easily kept things rolling for decades at a time if he wanted to, but if he was no longer playing with the same fire as he used to back in the day, what was the point of him trying to make an artificial version of it?
