The songwriter Billy Joel hailed as “the grandfather of the whole thing”
Billy Joel always had a different definition of songwriting than the rest of the rock and roll world.
Even though many people revelled in that moment of pure inspiration where every single piece of a song came together, Joel never forgot how gruelling a song could be to write if he didn’t have the right lyric behind everything or if he was stuck trying to pare a song down to the length of a single. But if you listen to some of his favourite records, it’s clear he wasn’t in the business to make every song into a bite-sized symphony.
He was already worshipping people like Beethoven and Mozart from before he even played rock and roll, and when you listen to his music, a lot of his songs lend themselves well to that kind of arrangement. Sure, ‘For The Longest Time’ and ‘Uptown Girl’ sound like mindless pop songs on the surface, but there’s a lot of musical sophistication going on that didn’t happen on the charts unless it was someone like Burt Bacharach.
Joel had a deep well of musical knowledge, but he at least had people like The Beatles to fall back on as artists who really knew what they were doing. They may not have known the first thing about reading sheet music or writing down what they were trying to aritculate with every song, but it’s hard to listen to their classics like ‘Hey Jude’ or even deeper cuts like ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ and not get excited when it veers off into a much different direction half the time.
But before the likes of the Fab Four or even Elvis Presley, the pop song was only starting to congeal. There had been the deep emotion of the blues anchoring things down, and jazz definitely gave people a refined palette for different kinds of harmonies, but it all originated from classical music, and compared to the symphonies of Bach or Brahms, Franz Schubert was paving the way for the pop song before it even had a medium.
Looking through his pieces, not all of them have the most singable choruses or anything like that, but they are some of the most concise masterpieces anyone has ever heard. Most people would have been happy to listen to different movements for up to an hour at a time until every piece was finally fleshed out, but in Schubert, Joel heard how he could fit his musical ideas into the pop song format.
Even if the composer passed away over a century before the likes of pop music began, Joel saw the blueprint all laid out in those pages of musical score, saying, “I think almost all songwriters from my school of songwriting all harken back to the middle of the 19th century, ultra melodic, ultra romantic music. And if you really go back far enough, the grandfather of the whole thing was probably Schubert, because he specialised in song forms.”
If you listen to what Joel was doing on his final project, though, it was a lot more authentic to how Schubert used to write. He had finally decided to leave rock and roll behind altogether for Fantasies and Delusions, and even if he couldn’t play everything completely perfect, he felt far more fulfilled writing classical pieces than having to make a new record that the charts would go for.
Then again, is there that much dissimilarity between rock and roll and what classical musicians used to back in the day? They were both meant to bring joy to people’s lives and take their listeners to places that no one had ever been before, so Joel was simply putting a bit more taste into his music than what other rock stars were used to doing at the time.
