The songs Billy Joel called “true originals”
If there’s one thing you can almost always come to expect from an artist, it’s a slight degree of ego.
Balanced in a strange and variable equation with anxiety or insecurity, it’s a sense that all creatives likely know well. But every now and then, the scales tip into pure self-confidence, like this Billy Joel moment.
If you were to map out the creative process, it would be a circle in which an artist spirals around and around between crippling self-doubt and a total god complex. The doubt usually comes in the weeds of the process of making something. The god complex usually comes after, right as the high hits when you sit back and look at the thing you made.
However, most of the time, it doesn’t really stick around. Even for icons who have created timelessly beloved works of art, that doubt can creep back in. That’s why there are often comments from people like Paul McCartney or cinematic heroes like Martin Scorsese, critiquing their own work years or decades down the line, still wondering if they should’ve done something slightly different. It’s simply the nature of the work and the typical nature of the type of person making it.
Billy Joel deserves to have confidence in himself – there’s no doubt about that. For a man who has written a long list of enduring hits, including some painstakingly beautiful ones like ‘Vienna’, he deserves to feel self-assured and proud of his talent. Clearly, he is as in 1990, he packed the praise onto himself but disguised it in the form of analysis.
“All my singles have been really strange records, if you think about it,” he said, musing on his decisions with two tracks in particular as he added, “’Uptown Girl’ was strange. ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ was strange.”
Strange, maybe, isn’t the right word, given that both are complete radio hits, yet both do appeal to a certain kind of theatrical whimsy that Joel’s rockier peers wouldn’t have touched at the time.
‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ especially stands out. Packed with cultural references, it’s almost more of a history lesson than a pop song, or at the very least, it’s a deeply adventurous pop song given how many words he packs into a still neat four-minute radio-ready package. As for ‘Uptown Girl’, it’s less of a strange song and more a deeply twee one that merged his era with a clear 1940s or ‘50s inspiration, which was something others weren’t particularly into by the 1980s.
In his eyes, those two songs stand completely alone as he said, “I believe – and I think you will agree – that these were true originals. And everything I have done has been untypical of its time.”
It’s a hefty compliment to deliver yourself, but that’s nice in a way. It’s nice to hear an artist truly celebrate their own work rather than feign coyness in the face of it. He levelled it up even more, adding, “That surely is the hallmark of someone who is a cut above the average in the profession.”
Ranking himself above the rest, it was clearly a god complex day in the life of Billy Joel.
