Credit: Far Out / Columbia Records
Sun 11 October 2026 1:45, UK
Billy Joel was never going to tell anyone that he was the next rock and roll Pavarotti by any stretch.
Some of the greatest voices in rock and roll didn’t necessarily have to be clean or anything, but when you look through some of the biggest tunes of his career, Joel knew how to copy all of his favourite artists and make them sound absolutely wonderful whenever he worked on his best impression of someone like Ray Charles or even John Lennon. But by the time that he worked on some of his greatest tunes, he still knew that he was far away from anything that the true legends were capable of doing.
Then again, the soft-spoken kind of voice that Joel had is one of the reasons why he is so beloved. He was the epitome of the everyman in a lot of his songs, and while he tried his best to make every one of his tunes work exactly like they should have, the reason why he sounded so great was because he genuinely sounded like that hapless pianist in the bar on ‘Piano Man’ or the lovestruck kid that found the love of his life on ‘Just the Way You Are’.
His greatest songs felt like you were listening to an old friend half the time, but sometimes there’s an appeal to going big whenever you make a record. Joel’s albums certainly weren’t lacking in melodrama when looking at some of the greatest ballads that he ever made, but when working on an album like The Stranger, ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ is the kind of tune that no one else could have made work the same way that he did through all seven minutes of the record.
But when he tried to follow up on one of his best works, he got the chance to spread out a little bit more. 52nd Street took influence from a lot of jazz, and while tunes like ‘My Life’ and ‘Big Shot’ were still the best kind of pop rock that he could make at the time, ‘Until the Night’ was a lot more ambitious from a vocal standpoint. That’s because Joel had a very particular person in mind when sculpting that song: The Righteous Brothers.
Because when it comes to rock and roll melodrama, there aren’t many people who could manage to make their songs sound as good as Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. Both of them were amazing vocalists when they started, but the idea of anyone being able to carry a song like ‘Unchained Melody’ for minutes on end would have never been able to make it work the same way they did.
There had already been other versions of the tune out there in the wild, but Joel felt that the Righteous Brothers had the best kind of vocal precision for that song, saying, “I don’t know if anyone who doesn’t sing understands how hard it is to sing a song like that in half time. It was great. This took phrasing [to a new level]. This took a real understanding of how to sing. The only thing I could compare it to was Roberta Flack’s ‘First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’. It was hypnotic and it was delicious.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And what makes it so delicious, as Joel is wont to say, is the subtle inflexions in the voice. Anyone else would try their best to carry the tune for as long as they could, but when Hatfield is singing his part on the tune, hearing him get to the line ‘I’ve hungered for your touch’ and make the final consonant sound as quiet and gentle as possible is something that only the greatest rock and roll stars are born with.
So while Joel has admitted to trying and failing to sing like the Righteous Brothers, that shouldn’t really be that much of a knock against him. He was only trying to make something that could stand on their level, but no one really knows what they’re getting themselves into with that band until they actually try to sing those tunes themselves and get their asses handed to them.
