It’s Still Rock ’N’ Roll

“This was a whaling town,” says Billy Joel, sipping coffee downstairs at the rustically posh American Hotel in Sag Harbor, New York. “They wrote about it in Moby Dick. There was a guy named Queequeg on the ship with Captain Ahab, and he was from here. All these respectable places around here used to be bars or bordellos.”

In many ways, such juxtaposition between grunge and civility is as applicable to Billy as it is to the wealthy and exclusive Hamptons village in which we met. Thoroughly steeped in the dirt and rage of rock ’n’ roll, the piano-shattering singer/songwriter currently finds true love in the Romantic era, citing Chopin and Rachmaninov as inspirations. And though Billy’s musical output can be as raw and visceral as that of any performer you’ll find, stick around for a ballad and you’ll hear a refined, Romantically-informed melodicism most rockers could never hope to achieve.

Though he’s on a potentially permanent hiatus from rock songwriting, the multi-Grammy winning artist’s life has been far from quiet in recent years. ’99 saw him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, while in ’01, he jumped genres to release an album of classical compositions for piano entitled Fantasies & Delusions (Sony). Pushing aside such popular Broadway productions as La Boheme and Hairspray, Billy received a “Best Orchestrations” Tony award in ’03 for for Movin’ Out, a smash hit that combined some of his most notable songs with dance routines by renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp.

Billy’s millennial accomplishments aren’t all behind the scenes, though. Released in ’06, 12 Gardens Live captures highlights of his record-breaking sold-out run at Madison Square Garden. Amidst continued international touring, Billy also recorded a gift of song for his wife, the bittersweet “All My Life.” Released in ’07, the string-orchestrated, Tony Bennett-style jazz ballad was the first Billy Joel single since tracks from River of Dreams reached fans over a decade earlier. And the most recent development? Columbia Records is preparing to re-release The Stranger for the album’s 30th anniversary. Featuring compositions like “She’s Always a Woman,” “Movin’ Out,” and “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” the disc contains some of Billy’s strongest, most inspired songwriting; the hugely popular “Just the Way You Are” even won the album twin Grammy nods in 1978.

At 58, Billy is legendary, a veteran artist widely regarded as rock divinity. “Why am I still doing this?’” he asks. “Because I can. The minute I can’t, I’m not going to do it. I don’t want to be a hack. I don’t want to be a mere shadow of what I was.” What’s propelled him to such success and longevity? How did he write those amazing songs? Read on for part one of our two-part interview.

If you sat down to re-record the tunes on The Stranger as the artist you are today, what would be different?
We probably would have had the same approach. This was back in the ’70s, it was analog, and we recorded a lot of that album live, where I would play the piano with the rhythm section and sing at the same time — which created a good deal of leakage, which we like. We wanted the drum leaking on the vocal track, the vocal leaking on the piano track, because it made for its own organic sound. What I would probably do differently now, I probably would have used a different sound for the drums. I would have done more processing. I listen to them now and they seem a little flat, a little sticky. I would have fattened them up.

You never stop tweaking, even when an album comes out, but you have to realize that you’re never going to really stop rethinking what you’ve already recorded, and you have to leave it. You have to walk away while you’re still kind of connected to it. If you beat it into the ground and you end up hating it and it becomes drudgery, then you’re going to have no objectivity at all.
So there’s a natural time you spend with a recording where there’s an arc of, first off, “Ooh, this might be a good thing,” the inspired performance, then saying, “Okay, this take is the one we like,” so you’re fully bloomed in love. And then it sort of starts to fall off the more you work on it. It’s like a marriage. When you have to start working on it, you’re not all that crazy about it.

So there was a natural time to leave it alone, although, in my mind, to this day, I still listen to recordings and think I could have done this, I could have done that. So you never stop potchka-ing — which is a good word. I love Yiddish.

For the albums you recorded after The Stranger, did you stick to the same plan of recording live?
Pretty much always. The Stranger was the first album where the band I was working with and I had a guy who had some name value as a producer [Phil Ramone] — who actually encouraged the musicians. The Piano Man album was done with session musicians, as was Street Life, which was the third album. And then for Turnstiles, I already had a road band. We were touring. I wanted to record with those guys. I didn’t want to use session musicians. I thought we had our own organic sound.

I met with George Martin, who was the producer of the Beatles — this was in 1976 — and he wanted to produce me, but he didn’t want to use my musicians. Also, I have to back up a bit — I was also working with the guys who ran Caribou Studios, Caribou management. Jimmy Guercio was a very successful producer for Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, and Elton John. He wanted me to work with Elton’s band, and I didn’t want to do it. Now you have to understand, I’d been on Columbia for two albums that didn’t really do all that well. Even though “Piano Man” was a hit, it wasn’t a big album. It was a turntable hit. So when it came time to record again, Guercio wanted me to use Nigel Olsson and Dee Murray, Elton John’s band. I said, “Well that’s crazy. He’s him. Why would I want to be him?” Here I was fighting the powers that be. In the meantime, you have to imagine a red line goes through my name at Columbia if I don’t do this.

So I said, “I’ll try it.” We played a couple songs, and they weren’t giving me what I was looking for, even though they were nice guys and good musicians. It wasn’t the same as working with my band, so I said, “This is ridiculous. I don’t want to be Elton John. I want to be me.” I left. My wife took over the management at that time. I left the biggest management company in the business. Now that that red line is becoming more and more substantive: “Oh, his wife is going to manage him? And he fired Caribou management and he fired Jimmy Guercio as a producer and he wouldn’t work with Elton John’s band?” I was going to work with my band, come hell or high water. So I met with George Martin. He wanted to produce me, but he didn’t want to use my band. So I passed on the Beatles’ producer.

That’s gutsy.
Well, you can imagine, Columbia is going, “Now he won’t work with the Beatles’ producer? Who does this guy think he is?” I was insistent on working with my band and I ended up producing Turnstiles myself. We went in with an engineer in Hempstead, Long Island — there was a studio called Ultrasonic where the Isley Brothers used to record — and made the album. It wasn’t really produced very well, but it was my band.

Looking back, I can think, “Wow, that album could really have used a good producer,” and I wasn’t it. I don’t know technicalities. I say “Gimme some woojh-woojh,” or “Put a little more fuujh sound on the bass. I want more air around the voice.” That album had some good songs on it, but the album itself did not chart anywhere. At that point, I think Columbia was probably ready to dump me. Their investment wasn’t paying off.

The album that came next was The Stranger, and after years and years of listening to a lot of the records I liked, I saw certain engineers who were involved in the recordings. Phil Ramone was one of those guys. He wasn’t a producer, per se; he didn’t really get a production credit on a lot of stuff, but he was the engineer on some really good records. I said, “This guy’s gotta know what he’s doing.” We got together with Phil. He had seen us play at Carnegie Hall with my band, and he loved us. We were kinda raw and ragged. It wasn’t finessed. There was a lot of rock and roll in it, and that’s what he wanted to go for. So he encouraged the band. To me, in listening to The Stranger, that’s what I hear — the band being part of the process and being included in what was going on. There was a lot of joy and confidence in that album.

How do you feel your piano playing has evolved since you recorded The Stranger?
The interesting thing to me about my piano playing is that I’ve become more acutely aware of how lousy I am as a pianist. [Laughs.] When I was younger and more brash, arrogant, and ambitious, I thought I was pretty damn good. As I got older and wiser, I realized that I stink. The really good pianists are people like Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, and Art Tatum and, of course, the classical pianists. We all stink next to them. In rock ’n’ roll, you don’t really have to be all that skilled. A lot of rock is percussive. You strike a piano, you hit it, just like a drum, and that was sort of my expertise. I was more of a banger than a player. Even though I had about 12 years of classical training, I walked away from that music because it just got too difficult. I didn’t want to work hard. I wanted to have fun. And now I find myself at a point where, damn it, I wish I’d studied more. ’Cause that’s the stuff that I really wish I could play. Even when I wrote piano pieces back in ’01, I realized I wasn’t good enough to play them properly. I needed a hired gun. I got a virtuoso piano player to do it.

My technique has probably changed over the years, moving away from trying to play a lot of notes and have a lot of flash, I suppose, similar to a guy like Clapton. Back in the late ’60s, Eric was the god of the guitar and it was all about how many notes and riffs [he could play] and noodling and jamming. He became very humble about his guitar playing and kind of retreated back into chords and progressions and how much you don’t play. I think that’s what happened to me. I became extremely aware of how little it meant to have a lot of notes, how much more important the chords were, the construction of the song itself, rather than pyrotechnics.

What was your songwriting process like when you worked on The Stranger? Has it changed since then?
My songwriting process has pretty much always been the same. I write the music first and I don’t have lyrics. I don’t always have an idea of what the song is about, or a message or anything. To me, the message is the music. Encoded in a musical composition, there is an emotion, a mood, a thought. There is some kind of experience in the thematic piece, in music that is just music, and the puzzle is figuring out what’s encoded. Take a song like “She’s Always a Woman.” That’s in Eb which is kind of a strange key for me. I don’t usually write in flat keys because I’m very ignorant about flat keys. I stay away from them as often as I can.

But that makes for an interesting writing technique because if I don’t know what I’m doing in a particular key, I’ll look for a key that I’m familiar with inside the progression. I start in Eb [hums the opening of the song]. Oh my god, Ab, [continues humming as the chord progression continues] G! [Sighs in relief.] Ah, it doesn’t have any black notes in it. I look for these little home safe areas within a key I’m not familiar with. That dictates a lot of what my writing process is. How can I work chords that I do know into a key I don’t know?

My limitations actually force me to be ingenious. If I don’t know where I am, if I don’t speak the language, if I’m in Egypt, I gotta find somebody who speaks English, and that’s how I go searching when I’m writing.

So here I am in Eb and I’m playing the chords, humming the melody, it’s like a folk song — Gordon Lightfoot! [Continues to hum the melody in a huskier tone with a sea chantey feel.]
And the lyrics?

So I had the melody and I was living in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. I was on the 35th floor: “La La La, the view from the 35th floor.” [Sings to the refrain, “always a woman to me.”] That’s how I remembered the stupid melody. I had to use bailout lyrics. I would write it down. I wouldn’t even know how to write the music. So I called it “The View From the 35th Floor,” and I knew as soon as I said it, “No, that ain’t going to be the song.” And then eventually, after playing it enough times, without the words, the words became apparent, what it should be about. There was some kind of message in the music, a meaning there, an emotion, a mood. Why did I write that melody? Where did it come from? And it became “She’s always a woman to me,” from my own life experience.

Most people write a poem or lyric and set it to music. That’s the classic way to write a song. I write music first, then I jam lyrics on top. It’s kind of a backwards way of doing it, but it works for me. Of course, I don’t do it anymore, but that’s what I used to do.

Can you describe the decoding process?
I’ll write the music at the piano but, most times when I’m away from the piano, the tape loop is going on in my head. “She’s always a woman to me . . . wait a minute!” Sometimes you have to not think about it and be in an unconscious situation in regards to writing a song, and then it occurs.

For some artists, songwriting is a gut-wrenching experience. For others, it doesn’t seem to phase them at all. Where in that spectrum do you fall?
I’m not one of those guys who writes 500 songs and whittles it down to ten. I know Dylan does it, and Springsteen does it. I pretty much write what you hear on an album. By the time I’ve gotten to the end of the tenth song, I’m so completely drained and crippled [laughs] from hauling this stuff out, that I don’t have anything left. I liken it to the birthing process. There’s a pregnancy where you’re fraught with music but it hasn’t come out. Then there’s the birthing process, which is labor and is very painful. You’ve gotta kind of open up your guts and put them on the table, pour through them, stuff them back in, and sew yourself up — and do it again for the next song. I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy having written.

But when you hear an album that has ten songs on it, that’s what I’ve written. There may be a piece of something here or there that I haven’t used. I call them spare parts. A carburetor that doesn’t really work, I put that in the spare parts bin. If I wrote it, I figure maybe it’s worth saving, and I put all this junk in the junk pile, and when I start the next process of writing and I need a connector piece of something, I go rummaging through my spare parts bin and I go, “Oh this carburetor won’t work. But look, that thing plugs in perfectly.”

That moment of inspiration, that Promethean moment, we don’t always understand where it came from. A lot of times we suspect its something we’ve heard before. “How could I have done this that quickly, that easily?” There’s a feeling that sometimes you stick your head up into this rarefied atmosphere and the idea comes through in some kind of Zeus-like process, but I have a theory that we dream these things and then forget what we dreamt, then through some innocuous moment that has nothing to do with songwriting, the dream recurs to you and you have that inspirational moment. It’s already been created in your mind. You just haven’t tapped into it yet.

Did that happen on The Stranger?
That happened with “Just the Way You Are.” I was in the middle of a business meeting, which was really boring, something to do with accounting or law, and all of a sudden, [sings quietly] “Don’t go changin’, trying to please me,” or maybe I used the words “Don’t go crazy,” “Don’t be lazy,” some stupid lyric. But the melody occurred to me. I went, “Oh, I gotta go! Right now. I gotta go write a song!” and they were like, “Go, go, write!” Same thing happened with “New York State of Mind.” I was on a bus. I was nowhere near a piano. I was just moving back to New York from California, and it all came at once. I was like, “How did this happen?”

What was the compositional process like for “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant?”
“Scenes From An Italian Restaurant” was three or four different songs that I just jammed together. I was inspired by side two of Abbey Road, where I know that’s exactly what happened. They just came in with fragments of things and George Martin stitched it together. And that’s what happened with this song. There were at least three different themes: one was the Italian restaurant scene, “A bottle of white, a bottle of red,” then “Remember those days,” which was originally a song called “Things Are Okay in Oyster Bay,” and that became “Things are okay with me these days,” Then there was the “Ballad of Brenda and Eddie,” and I used all this connective tissue to pull it together.

So it wasn’t realized in one shot. But it was recorded all in one shot. We recorded that live from beginning to end.

That’s a pretty epic song to record in one pass.
At the time, my drummer, he didn’t read music either, but he had lyrics, so he knew where he was by reading the words. If I came in and tried to record a track without lyrics, he wouldn’t know where he was, and he’d make up his own words, which is why the song “Honesty” became “Honesty.” He was in the same room as me, I could hear his drum track, and he was singing whatever words popped into his head so he could follow the progression, and I didn’t have lyrics. We got to the chorus, and I heard him sing “Sodomy,” and I said, “Oh boy, I have to call it something,” so I pulled “Honesty” out. Why? I’m not particularly the most honest person in the world. I had to call it something. Necessity was the mother of invention there.

A Selected Billy Joel Discography

12 Gardens Live (Columbia)
My Lives (Columbia)
Fantasies & Delusions (Sony)
River of Dreams (Columbia)
Glass Houses (Columbia)
The Stranger (Columbia)
Turnstiles (Sony)
Piano Man (Columbia)

To learn Billy’s classical work, check out the Hal Leonard book Fantasies & Delusions.

Other Hal Leonard Billy Joel books include:

The Stranger (30th Anniversary folio edition)
The Billy Joel Collection
Billy Joel Classics 1974-1980 (includes CD)
Billy Joel Hits 1981-1993 (includes CD)
The Billy Joel Keyboard Book (note-for-note transcriptions)

Hal Leonard publications are available at music and bookstores nationwide, or through Music Dispatch (800-637-2852, www.musicdispatch.com).