The one songwriter Billy Joel said changed all lyricists forever: “Such a literate writer”
Writing songs wasn’t something that came easy to Billy Joel.
Despite having some of the greatest musical training of anyone in rock and roll, there was something about coming up with that perfect melody and words that felt almost torturous whenever Joel got behind the microphone to put a tune together. He would much rather be proud of the music that he wrote than worry about writing again, but he felt that there were always people making sure that he was at the top of his game.
But when rock and roll first started, the songs didn’t have to mean anything substantial. The biggest songs by Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry weren’t the most thoughtful things in the world, but when Bob Dylan came along, there was a lot more going on. He wanted to change how everyone thought about pop lyrics, and Joel was willing to put something a bit more cerebral into his songs as a result. That said, it’s not like he hit it out of the park every single time he played, either.
He acknowledged that a lot of the songs he wrote weren’t exactly feats of poetry. ‘The Entertainer’ is a biting commentary on the music business, but when you look at ‘Honesty’, even Joel had to wonder if he was coming off as condescending whenever he talked about everyone not telling the truth. He had no right to talk, and his role was best suited when he was telling mini stories in only a few minutes.
Everyone can picture that smokey bar that he’s playing in on ‘Piano Man’ or gazing out at the open road as Brenda and Eddie leave town on ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’, and that’s because those snapshots came so easy. Not every story song needed to teach a lesson in the end by any means, and when looking at what the greatest songwriters of his generation were doing, Joel could see the better new wave bands doing the same thing when they started working on their lyrics.
The punk revolution cut a lot of the bullshit out of rock and roll, but there were far more artists that were willing to push the envelope when it came to the construction of their songs. Elvis Costello wasn’t looking to make the most cerebral songs of all time when working with the Attractions, but This Year’s Model and My Aim is True had these nuanced stories and mixed messages about what people really got up to in their daily lives.
Not all of his songs were pleasant to hear, but Joel felt that he was looking at a genuine talent when he started taking a few cues from Costello, saying, “He’s such a literate writer. It’s not the cleverness that gets to me, it’s his use of the English language — it’s a beautiful and also a tough language. Costello has tied them both together. I think he’s had an impact on every group that followed him — he’s the godfather of that whole New Wave. I don’t think you can be a thinking writer and not have been affected by him.”
Which probably explains why Paul McCartney ended up wanting to work with Costello later in his career. There are hardly any writers working today that could fill in that John Lennon role in McCartney’s songs, but when listening to the way that they harmonised together on songs on the album Flowers in the Dirt, Costello was great at playing the sardonic opposite to Macca’s optimism every time they worked.
Because while McCartney’s whimsy is what made everyone love him back in the day, it was never about trying to make the sunniest track in the world to Costello. All great songs tend to have that bittersweet edge to them, and you can feel that heartache in a lot of his ballads. He knows that being happy isn’t a foregone conclusion, but he’s not ruling out happiness in any of his tunes, either.
