Credit: Far Out / Columbia Records
Sun 4 October 2026 15:30, UK
Billy Joel didn’t ever want to be afraid to switch things up on any number of his albums.
While his role as the more laid-back balladeer has followed him around ever since he started, the fact is that the guy had a rock and roll heart underneath all of the more classically-influenced music that he played some of the time. Everyone might have tried to keep him in a box, but there’s a lot more substance to him to explore if you look past the more cringy parts of his most famous hits.
Hell, Joel would even agree with you if you said that some of his songs weren’t all that good. He knew that some of his most famous tunes were still flawed, and even though he got one of his biggest hits out of a song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, he has made it abundantly clear that it wasn’t exactly the best melody that he’s ever written. Because for him, what tied everything together was always centred around whether the melody actually sounded good without the bells and whistles.
Even ‘Uptown Girl’ could have been considered a classical piece of music had he not used it for one of his biggest hits, and everything else that he made had to live up to that standard as well. Nothing that he ever made was supposed to be too simple, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still be influenced by some of the more rudimentary musicians that were coming out around the same time he was.
The Stranger introduced him to the biggest audience he ever had, but there were also more than a few people who were interested in rock and roll getting heavier. The first wave of punk bands didn’t really have time to listen to Joel croon over ‘Just the Way You Are’, but it’s not like Joel wanted to do that, either. He was interested in where music was going, and Glass Houses was the closest thing that he ever had to making a typical power pop album for that time.
A lot of it was reminiscent of the kind of tunes that he had been playing when he was a kid, but there was also just a hint of new wave music in there as well. No one would have expected someone like Joel to make a record so guitar-driven, but if his friends, like Bruce Springsteen, saw themselves in punk acts like the Ramones, Joel didn’t really see the appeal in listening to bands like the Sex Pistols when he first saw them.
They certainly got a lot of attention thanks to their antics, but Joel felt that there was no real point behind something like ‘God Save the Queen’ when he heard it, saying, “The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ bored the hell out of me. If I go to a disco and hear one boom-sup-boom tempo all night, I get a headache and split. If I go to a New Wave club and all I hear is ‘Fuck you!’ and the guy spits on me all night. I’m sorry. I don’t like it.”
Further reading: From The Vault
And it’s not like Joel was the only one who was a little bit tired of the provocative side of rock and roll. He wasn’t the sort to scare easily when listening to the most dangerous bands in the world, and while he was the last guy to think about dumbing down his sound, even the more straight-ahead rockers like Tom Petty were more than a little bit agitated that John Lydon was being given a platform when he first came out as well.
But that just comes down to the different upbringing that Joel had when he first started putting together his first melodies. So many other people would have tried their best to make rock and roll that had a bit more substance, so when a band that was all about causing as much cacophony as possible while the rest of the world looked on in awe, it’s not like he was that psyched about it.
