The one song Billy Joel said was absolute crap: “I was trying to do Sting there”
Songwriting has been both a blessing and a curse for Billy Joel.
He is one of the finest pop songwriters of all time and has been behind some of the most fantastic melodies that the world has ever seen, and yet when he talks about writing all of them, most of the time, he sounds like he’s being tortured into making the best tunes that he could hope to make. His first love was performance over writing half the time, and if the end result was something that he didn’t like, it didn’t take him that long to say so.
But when looking through Joel’s entire discography, there aren’t too many records where he overtly struck out. He doesn’t have a Self Portrait under his belt that all of us can point and laugh at, and even on the records that didn’t take off right at the start of his career, there were still quality tunes on every one of them. Cold Spring Harbor may have had a patchy production job and sounds almost nothing like him, but ‘She’s Got A Way’ is still one of the best songs that he ever wrote and remains a fixture of his setlist.
Then again, there’s probably a good reason why some of his songs didn’t really appeal to what the labels might have wanted. Joel didn’t fit into a neat box like all the other pinup stars of the time, and even if he had a knack for writing fantastic melodies, it was a lot less exciting for him to go along with what the crowd was doing and follow his muse. That might have led to a few suits getting mad at songs like ‘The Entertainer’, but he could have really cared less from behind his piano.
Once he started racking up some major hits, though, Joel wasn’t exactly ready to become the next big pop star or anything. He was just the average kid from Long Island who happened to have some of the greatest pop songs under his belt, but if it wasn’t necessarily “cool” to like him at the time, he could at least embrace the poppiness of his songs when he started working on An Innocent Man.
He was in love with Christie Brinkley at the time, and with songs like ‘The Longest Time’ and ‘Uptown Girl’ on the charts, he was sharing the spotlight with every other starlet on MTV just fine. But when he had a daughter for the first time, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life out on tour. He needed some time to take a break, but that’s not what the label had in mind when he went to work on The Bridge.
While Joel struggled to find inspiration all the time, he remembered feeling absolutely ashamed to have made a song like ‘Running on Ice’, saying, “[It’s] crap. I was trying to do Sting there, and the lyric is okay, but the words and the music just don’t line up. There was a kind of frenetic urban thing to it. I was living in the city and feeling the pressure now.” You can certainly hear Sting a little bit, but Joel isn’t necessarily the kind of guy who can pull this off.
He did a fabulous job emulating Mick Jagger on ‘Big Shot’, but aside from the hook being a little too hurky-jurky, the tone of it feels all wrong. There were plenty of opportunities for him to use different sounds for his records, but if his classics made people feel everything from lovestruck to wistful, this is the first time where you can hear him being bored in the studio wanting to get back home.
No one can blame a man wanting to get back home to his wife and child, but if Joel had it his way, ‘Running on Ice’ would have probably never seen the light of day. It was a decent enough kicking off point for a record, but if the cracks are already starting to show on the first single, that’s usually a bad sign.
