The one song Billy Joel called “a work of genius”
No song on any Billy Joel record was necessarily cut out to be a hit.
He had a firm love of all kinds of great pop music, but he was always looking to make the best songs that he could rather than worry about whether or not one of the songs was going to have a better chance at charting than the rest of the tunes on his record. He was making art half the time he made new songs, but he had the ambition to push himself further by having the right people in his record collection to listen to.
But a lot of Joel’s best works tended to operate in a lot of different ways. Most people weren’t ready to hear him when he debuted with The Stranger, but even if he wasn’t the coolest rock and roll star in the world, it was hard to deny the craftsmanship of every one of those tunes. So when he finally had a foothold on the charts, it was up to him to stretch things out as far as he could take it when he started gaining traction.
Every one of his subsequent records was about toying with a different side of his sound, but there were always those few artists he could stand by. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t reference the likes of Beethoven whenever he was making his records, and even when he was making a no-frills rock and roll song, he wasn’t going to say it was fully done unless he could perform the song like a classical piece of music.
That was the litmus test for him to tell whether the song was any good or not, and while not everything passed that test, it was a lot easier for him to find the melody if he had the right sets of chords behind him. It can be difficult for anyone to pick out those kinds of melodies, but The Beatles had been showing everyone how to create the most timeless rock and roll tunes ever made long before Joel got started.
‘The Piano Man’ practically idolised all of the Fab Four when he got started recording, and while you can hear echoes of Paul McCartney’s whimsy in a few of his tunes, there’s a much more refined scope to what he was doing on tracks like ‘Just the Way You Are’. But when he started to create the massive journey on ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’, he pointed to the end of Abbey Road as his guidebook for what he wanted to do.
The Fab Four had already seen the end of the record as a bunch of disparate tunes that they strung together, so Joel felt there was nothing stopping him from doing the same thing, saying, “It was kind of based on side two of Abbey Road. I think The Beatles all came in with individual song fragments and George Martin helped them sew it all together. It’s looked on now as a work of genius but I said ‘I know what happened.’ They didn’t finish the songs, they didn’t feel like it, and George Martin said ‘Why don’t we do this?’ That’s pretty much what I was going for.”
But whereas Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam don’t really have any connective tissue apart from being tied together, there’s a lot more pieces for the audience to latch onto in Joel’s story. Brenda and Eddie’s tale from being in the middle of a restaurant to reminiscing on the days when they were fresh out of high school with stars in their eyes is like watching an old film noir movie in the span of seven minutes, and when everything comes back down to Earth at the end, it feels like all of the gory details of the relationship are finally in a more natural place.
You can call it lazy trying to put all of these pieces together, but Joel knew what separates lazy songwriting from the geniuses was how they arranged everything. The Beatles weren’t looking to string everything together for the hell of it, and if they managed to put the proper care and attention into their songs and come out with a masterpiece, there was no stopping kids like him from trying out the same thing.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.