The two songs Billy Joel admits are “total stinkers”
There are very few artists throughout history whose cultural and artistic output has been entirely without flaws. Missteps, mistakes and misguided efforts are important parts of finding your voice as a musician. As such, even pop music masters like Billy Joel have a certain number of songs that are certainly not a source of pride among their plethora of timeless hits. While, in the case of Joel, the good certainly outweighs the bad, these tracks remain a source of regret for the songwriter.
In a tale that seems to be pretty commonplace for musicians of Joel’s generation, the songwriter was first inspired on his path to musical greatness after seeing The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Beatles’ school of pop mastery likely goes some way to explaining Joel’s unique ability to produce seemingly endless hits. The songwriter did not take long to hit his commercial stride, becoming a definitive voice of rock and pop during the early 1970s, with tracks like ‘Piano Man’.
As Joel’s career progressed, the songwriter embraced a wide variety of different musical styles and genres, though usually centred around soft rock. Moving from grand piano-based tracks in the early 1970s to the 1980s pop mastery of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, the only thing in Joel’s music that remains constant was its commercial success. In the UK, the songwriter entered 15 tracks in the top 40 singles charts over the years, though not all of them are enmeshed in the same greatness as ‘Piano Man’.
While talking to the Los Angeles Times last year, the New York songwriter reflected upon his long and illustrious career, sharing that, if given his time again, he would omit “at least 25%” of his discography. Admittedly, when you have as many songs as Billy Joel, 25% forms a smaller part of that discography than you might expect, but it is certainly not an insignificant number. Joel even went as far as to pick out two tracks in particular that are the cause of some regret.
“I’ve written some real stinkers I wish I could take back,” Joel said, selecting 1989’s ‘When In Rome’ and 1980’s ‘C’était Toi’ as significant missteps. The latter track appeared on Joel’s seventh studio album, Glass Houses, which, as an entire record, was not one of the songwriter’s strongest efforts. ‘C’était Toi’ was certainly an odd track, with Joel reflecting, “I don’t even speak French, so I don’t know what I was doing.”
According to the songwriter, these various mistakes came from the intense pressure on himself to pump out hits consistently. “Sometimes I’d get six or seven songs I thought were pretty damn good,” he remembered, “then there’d be a couple of squeeze-outs at the end just to fill up the album.” It was these filler tracks which formed the basis of Joel’s regrets, particularly with regard to tunes like ‘When In Rome’.
Luckily, Joel was able to use these experiences as something of a learning curve. “I realise now I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, and it certainly seems as though the singer became more selective with what material he allowed record companies to release as the years went by. Nevertheless, tracks like ‘When In Rome’ and ‘C’était Toi’ remain stains on an otherwise commendable discography.
