“I’m not a poet”: Billy Joel could never write like Bob Dylan
Billy Joel didn’t need to hold himself to anyone else’s standards when he made his first masterpieces.
He was already on his way to becoming one of the biggest stars in the world by the time he made The Stranger, and even if he sounded a little more grown-up than the rest of his peers, he was willing to do whatever he could to get that one pop masterpiece that no one had heard before. Others had a gimmick, and others might have tried telling deep and intricate stories, but Joel was one of the few who could get his point across with pure music whenever he made a record.
That’s not to say that all of his lyrics were outright garbage by any stretch. He certainly had his personal grievances with a few of his songs throughout his career, but there are also a handful of tunes that are genuinely intriguing. ‘The Entertainer’ wasn’t going to do him any favours with the higher-ups at his record company, but the fact that he was able to stick his neck out on the line and talk about how the sausage was really made was a lot more brave than simply playing another version of ‘Piano Man’.
In fact, a lot of the best lyrics of his career are the ones that are perfectly suited to whatever music he’s playing. You can feel the heartache and pain throughout every single chord of ‘And So It Goes’ before he has ever sang one line, and even though ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ is either one of the best or worst songs that he has ever made depending on who you ask, you can tell that the song works as a kind of laundry list of world events based on how quickly he’s spouting off every single line of the melody.
But even if his lyrics were fun to go through, Joel would have been happy if he had never had to write another one of them again. The work that went into making any one of his records felt like pulling teeth to him half the time, and even when he had someone like Cyndi Lauper stepping in to help him every now and again, he wasn’t in love with the idea of continuing to make music for the pop charts after a record like River of Dreams.
He could have easily spent the rest of his days making classical music, but his dreams of being a pop writer weren’t as realistic to him anymore. Anyone of his stature usually needs to start changing the way they write after a little while, and while Bob Dylan may have been willing to change with the times, Joel felt that his music wasn’t nearly as good as the kind of lyrics that the folk icon was coming up with.
Dylan didn’t have the same kind of musical knowledge that Joel had, but ‘The Piano Man’ was the first to say that there was no way he could write anything as complex as Dylan’s writing, saying, “Dylan was the only one who could get away with not having the music as complete as the lyrics. A lot of times, I just write words for the sound of them, to complement a particular key or a particular pattern of notes. I’ve tried it. It ends up as a pretentious pile of garbage. I’m not a poet.”
Then again, Joel is simply working from a different angle whenever he throws in one of his tunes into the mix. He could have easily done a decent version of a Dylan tune when he did his own rendition of ‘Make You Feel My Love’, but even if the songwriting legend could appreciate what Joel did, there’s a good chance that he could never have figured out all the intricate chords that went into a tune like ‘Vienna’ or ‘Zanzibar’.
It was all about playing to one’s strengths, and even if Dylan had a different toolset than Joel’s, there was no chance that anyone could turn a phrase over like he could. It was a lot more work for Joel to sound convincing with his lyrics, but each of their respective songs have made up some of the finest pop music that the world had ever heard in the 1970s.
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