The one musician Billy Joel said played everything perfect
Not many people can claim to have the same kind of musical expertise that Billy Joel does.
He doesn’t claim to be some kind of songwriting genius by any stretch, but every single one of his songs is so meticulously crafted that you can’t really see any of them being more perfect than they already are. But for someone who has written some of the greatest anthems of his generation, ‘The Piano Man’ is quick to tell you that the true geniuses are well beyond anything he is capable of.
It’s not like Joel is rewriting the rules of music theory. A lot of what he did came back to the standard Western harmony that most people recognise, but when listening to all of his records, you can hear him paying tribute to some of the greatest names in pop. Sometimes it would be The Beatles, other times it would be the likes of Gershwin, but every step of the way was a new musical detour that no one would see coming, like the strange jazz vibe that runs throughout 52nd Street.
But it took a lot more than a standard rock and roll player to perform all of those iconic lines. Going to lessons for piano might not have been the coolest thing in the world for someone to admit, but all those years of learning the keyboard perfectly were a lot more gratifying than starting from scratch, trying to play along to Little Richard tunes. And when it came to classical musicians, Joel devoured every single thing that he could that caught his ear.
After all, he had heard classical pieces ever since his dad started playing them when he was a kid, and while he struggled for years before getting it right, there was a certain beauty in listening to some of Beethoven’s greatest works. Chuck Berry may have name-dropped the classical icon when talking about rock and roll taking over, but Joel could hear the humanity behind every single note.
Whereas most other classical composers could sound a little bit stiff when they were making their masterpieces, Beethoven was like The Beatles to Joel when first starting out. He didn’t have the kind of hit singles that the Fab Four did, but he could feel the same kind of emotion in the way that the different parts intermingled with each other.
Mozart may have had a more impressive track record for perfection, but there wasn’t anything that Beethoven played that was out of place in Joel’s mind, saying, “I would refer to Beethoven as God. Because everything he wrote was exactly right. I can’t name all of Mozart’s forty symphonies, maybe name a couple of them, but I can tell you pretty much everything about the nine Beethoven symphonies. His quartets, his concertos, his sonatas, all of it is just… it’s perfect. He always wrote exactly the right note.”
And that’s exactly what Joel has done whenever he’s made any new songs. It might have seemed like pulling teeth after a while trying to get the right note and lyric for every one of his melodies, but going through his entire songbook, you can hear the same attention to detail in his songs that you would have heard in a 16th century composer, which probably explains why he graduated to making classical piano pieces later on in his career.
He may have left pop music behind, but it wasn’t due to la ack of great hooks. He could still be inspired every single time he wrote music, but if he was going to make new music, he didn’t need lyrics to get his point across when he could write tunes that people like Beethoven would have approved of.
