The singer Billy Joel called one of the best rock voices: “The greatest”
Billy Joel didn’t tend to need a lot of window dressing around most of his songs.
Half of his tunes were impeccably produced whenever he put them out, but his number-one rule for a song being good was whether it could be played on a solo piano and still sound beautiful without any words. Any number of his songs could have fit into that category, and if ‘The Piano Man’ had his way, he would have rather gone down that road than get stuck listening to his own voice every time he made a record.
You have to understand that before Joel made it big, his goal was never about being a great singer. He liked the idea of making a few decent tunes and maybe becoming a songwriter, but the more times he tried to get his songs sounding right, it was always going to sound best when he was singing them. That said, it’s not like he didn’t try to change his style around every now and again to suit whatever his songs sounded like at the time.
Throughout every single album, you can hear him changing up the way he sings to fit whatever song he’s working on. An Innocent Man was him trying to pay tribute to every single one of his influences; his more soulful tunes saw him channelling people like Ray Charles, and even Attila was him trying to make the piano-driven Zeppelin-esque crossover that absolutely nobody asked for. Not all of them were successful by any means, but Joel could still try to transform himself whenever he wanted to.
‘New York State of Mind’ was the kind of song that demanded a more authoritative vocal out of him, but Joel didn’t claim to be one of the greatest singers in the world. He could do what he could whenever he had a song in front of him, but he felt that the real showstoppers were coming from the rock and roll world. Ray Charles had been his idol for years on end, but when the British invasion had begun, Joel was knocked out by virtually every voice that he heard on the radio.
The Beatles were a major turning point in his life, but some of the biggest names in rock had a little bit more edge to their voice. The blues rockers like Mick Jagger set the template for what a frontman was supposed to sound like, but years before Robert Plant was shouting to the rafters with Led Zeppelin, there was no one else in the world that could touch what Rod Stewart was doing in Joel’s mind.
Stewart had that signature rasp that could make anything sound cool, and Joel felt that that voice was everything that a rock band needed when cutting his own songs, saying, “[‘Los Angelenos’] I was thinking about Rod Stewart singing. He was with The Faces at the time and I thought he had one of the greatest rock voices at the time. That raspy thing. I wrote that for him. I have no idea if he ever heard it.”
The accompanying album Streetlife Serenader isn’t necessarily one of the best albums that Joel released by any stretch, but the fact that Stewart hardly heard it did help Joel stretch himself a bit more. He wanted the opportunity to make something that was steeped in another style of music, and since he was a new kid living in California, you can hear him trying on different musical hats to see what fit and what didn’t.
Not all of them worked, and he did make the right call coming back to New York to cut a lot of his greatest tunes, but having Stewart was as firm a foundation as he could have hoped for. Stewart wasn’t even the best vocalist out at the time, but in an era that gave the world everyone from Plant to Steve Marriott to even people like Steven Tyler, having Joel stretch himself out to sound like someone else was a great way of him roadtesting his songs.
