Credit: Far Out / Columbia Records
Fri 11 September 2026 16:30, UK
Billy Joel never claimed to have the greatest voice of anyone.
In the beginning, he was the one hesitant to even record his own songs, but when looking through his entire career, there was no way anyone else could have done justice to tunes like ‘New York State of Mind’ the same way that he did whenever he sang. But being able to deliver a song with charisma and being able to become a master frontman every time you go onstage are two totally different mediums whenever you work on putting a show together.
And it’s not like Joel is known for being one of the most electrifying frontmen of all time. He knew that there was no way that he was going to be Mick Jagger or anything, and sometimes one of the biggest perks of seeing ‘The Piano Man’ live was how much he took the piss out of that mentality. The thought of him even dressing like Jagger and performing was funny enough, but Joel felt much more connected to people like Ray Charles whenever he sat behind the piano to sing.
Charles was the perfect kind of musician for Joel to aspire to, but there was no way that he could match that kind of personality. The R&B legend had a natural gift that no one else could really copy, and while Joel did an admirable job mimicking him every now and again on many of his records, he knew that there was a whole different world of singers trying to outdo each other whenever they opened their mouths.
Led Zeppelin was a huge moment for him when he started performing, but there was no way for him to make that kind of music, either. Everyone heard what Attila sounded like, and while Joel was forever embarrassed by his meagre attempt to be a hard rock singer, it’s not like he didn’t have the right models to look up to. Robert Plant was showing everyone how it was done whenever he wailed, but there was no proper way to categorise what someone like Joe Cocker was doing whenever he sang.
His natural performing moves were some of the strangest in rock and roll at the time, but even if he had a unique way of expressing himself, everything sounded perfect whenever he started singing. No one would have dared to touch a song like The Beatles’ ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, but Cocker managed to take the song and turn it into the kind of tune that wouldn’t be out of place being sung by a gospel choir.
That doesn’t come from someone who doesn’t have some real passion behind what they’re doing, and Joel even had to admit that there weren’t many other singers who could pull off what Cocker was doing back then, saying, “These skinny little English guys were able to sing [blues]. Joe was in a long line of guys. He seemed like one of the last guys that was able to do it. You can hear it in his voice. As a songwriter, I wanted a guy like that to sing my songs. My intention was to be a songwriter, and I really appreciated someone like Joe Cocker who took a song and turned it into a tornado.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Cocker didn’t necessarily need to write a single melody in his life, but as long as he had a firm foundation, he could turn anything into magic whenever he started working on it… No one would have guessed that someone with that stage presence had that style of voice, but no one else would have been able to pull that kind of musical pain out of themselves the same way that Cocker did, either.
Which is why Joel spent most of his life trying to emulate what singers like him did when he became a solo artist – he needed to become an interpreter of his own songs, but Cocker showed him that all that mattered was if you had a lot of conviction behind what you were singing every time the lights came up.
