The one musician Billy Joel said played everything right: “Always perfect”
Rock and roll has never been about playing everything perfectly for Billy Joel.
Some of his greatest songs have been put together by accident, and even if he was trying to make the most complicated piece that anyone had ever heard, sometimes it’s better to keep everything a lot more sparse like he did when making a song like ‘The Stranger’. Less is more half the time that someone is making a song, but Joel didn’t stop thinking about his heroes that managed to do every single thing right whenever they made one of their songs.
When you look at Joel’s track record, though, half of his hits could have been considered perfect in their own way. ‘The Piano Man’ didn’t like the idea of phoning it in on any of his songs, and while he will hold his hand up and say when he thought one of his tunes was absolute crap, there were plenty more where he managed to show a different side of himself than what the majority of people could play.
He wasn’t the same percussive piano player that Elton John was, and a lot of what he was doing was about going beyond rock and roll altogether. He still liked the idea of making music that had the same attitude that he heard out of The Beatles and The Stones, but half of his greatest songs were almost like watching a classical musician that just so happened to be in love with rock and roll.
And that’s not too far off the mark, either. A lot of what Joel played as a kid was nothing but classical music, and even when he was starting to incorporate a bit more rock into the mix, he had to slide it past his parents and say that he was playing different movements of a classical piece than fess up to writing his own stuff. Every rock band had a special place in his heart, but nothing can really compare to what it was like for him hearing someone like Beethoven tear through his symphonies.
A lot of what he heard out of Mozart was almost too arranged for his taste, but Joel felt that nothing could take away from how Beethoven’s music made him feel, saying, “I would refer to Beethoven as God. Everything he wrote was exactly. I can’t name all of Mozart’s symphonies, but I could name you pretty much everything about the nine Beethoven symphonies. The concertos, the sonatas, they were always perfect. It was exactly the right note. How do you do that? I saw in his manuscripts, he gouges out huge passages. He was very human, and I hear that in his music, and that’s why I worship him.”
That craftsmanship was definitely what Joel aspired to be, but he probably didn’t expect it to be as difficult as what he would eventually get into on his own works. Because those moments where he gouged away at different parts of his own music is half the reason why he stopped trying to write pop songs. He didn’t want his tunes to become work, and by leaving his discography at just 12 albums, he seemed to take the same route that Beethoven did with his nine symphonies.
Does that mean that he stopped making music altogether? Absolutely not, but the tone of his music has changed considerably since then. He was done making music for the pop market, and even though there were a lot of moments where he was more focused on making classical music on Fantasies and Delusions, a lot of his music as of late is being made solely for himself, and it’s up to him whether he will actually show the rest of us what he’s come up.
I’m sure that some of those pieces are absolutely beautiful in his backlog, but Joel’s approach isn’t always about making songs to impress people. He’s rediscovering why music was so fun for him back in the day, and even if it’s hard for him to make anything for the pop market, he’s not about to force himself to write for the masses again if he can rest on his classical-tinged anthems.
