“Really important”: The one singer Billy Joel called the most influential writer of all time
Billy Joel didn’t get into the business knowing that he was going to be one of the biggest rock stars of all time.
Not everyone that had a hit record managed to look like him sitting behind a piano, but even if he was more sophisticated than others, it didn’t mean that he couldn’t level someone with the right song whenever he played live. He put all of his efforts into songwriting over anything else, but when he retired from songwriting, he could still pick out when some artists had him beat by a country mile.
But there’s no real sense of competition whenever someone decides to become a songwriter. Yes, there are actual charts that measure which song is “better” than which from a sales perspective, but Joel wasn’t in the business of making hits. He became a songwriter because he had something that he wanted to express, and that came from listening to his favourite artists express themselves from the time he first heard Beethoven.
Admittedly, Beethoven might not be the greatest rock star in the world compared to Keith Richards and John Lennon, but Joel didn’t really notice the difference when he first started playing. You could hear the different emotions that Beethoven was going through whenever he wrote some of his classics, and even if he had moments when you could hear things sounding melancholy, it didn’t take long to get back to the most triumphant songs ever made.
Joel practically had a road map for how to write hearing those classical pieces, but the rock and roll world catered to something with a lot more depth. Lyrics were always ‘The Piano Man’s Achilles heel whenever working on some of his greatest works, but even if he had a lot of great points to make across his catalogue, the time jotting down ideas for songs tended to become like pulling teeth.
While he may have said his piece by the time River of Dreams was coming out, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t appreciate the craft. The Beatles had been the models for everything that rock and roll could be when Joel had first started, and while the Anthology was coming out only a few years after Joel retired, he had a tremendous admiration for what Bob Dylan was doing when he started working on the song ‘To Make You Feel My Love’.
There are countless people who have taken a shot at covering the tune, but Joel simply marvelled at the fact that Dylan could make such a song this late in the game, saying, “I tried to pick songs by people who I thought were great songwriters who have been really important in my day. (Bob is) probably the most influential songwriter of my era and I heard this song. It came to my house via this guy who worked for Bob. I heard (his original demo version).”
But Dylan is one of the few that has never seen stopping as an option. Ever since the Neverending Tour began, Dylan has been committed to working on whatever song strikes his fancy at any point, and even though his later albums still have some bright spots, it’s astonishing to think that the same man who wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ is still around to give people songs like ‘Murder Most Foul’ after years of slogging away.
Then again, that’s the whole reason why Dylan got into the music business in the first place. Writing was never a fling for him, and if he was going to get good at it, he wanted to be able to have that eternal love affair with coming up with that next great song that no one had ever touched on before. He didn’t have the best voice of all time by any stretch, but if Joel had the best musical harmonies the pop world had ever seen, Dylan was the one cracking open the door to your mind whenever he made a tune.
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