Credit: Far Out / Alamy / Columbia Records
Wed 7 October 2026 4:00, UK
Billy Joel didn’t always like to think of himself as the typical rock star.
There’s the William Joel that he was every single day, but the ‘Piano Man’ that gets recognised on the street whenever he goes out is something much different from when he worked on any of his residencies in the past few years. He has come a long way from being just a typical guy from Long Island, but when you look at the kind of person that he was behind the scenes, he was much more interested in making music that could hold up next to the same heroes that he heard in his record collection as a kid.
He was nothing if not a child of his influences, but he knew that could be an albatross around his neck in some respects, too. The idea of him being at the same level as someone like Beethoven probably wasn’t in the cards for him, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have some of the greatest pop hits that anyone could have imagined at the time. He was still a fantastic songwriter, and that came with a lot of great moments as well.
The classical musicians he loved had a great deal of respect, but Joel wasn’t in it for the fame and fortune of it all. He heard a lot of people who had something to say whenever they made one of their records, and it wasn’t long before he started to see the magic in people like Bob Dylan whenever he played. The guy couldn’t sing like your average rock star, but it was worth it to hear him making tunes that made you think.
Granted, Dylan didn’t invent the idea of being a more astute songwriter, but it was much better than the typical dance songs going on at the time. There used to be only two topics you could sing about in rock and roll, and while pop anthems and romance tunes were the order of the day, Dylan admired the kind of language that took you on a journey from the minute that you heard the first chords coming in.
And in that grand tradition of songwriters, Gordon Lightfoot tends to get written out of the story all too often. Some of the biggest names of the genre might have been more attuned to what Dylan or even Leonard Cohen were doing around the same time, but there was so much more nuance to what Lightfoot was singing about that resonated with Joel a lot more than your average rockstar.
So when he heard about the places that both of them used to play, Joel remembered that he would do anything to see him sing live, saying, “I played the same places he played, Massey Hall in Toronto, which is a famous venue for artists like Gordon Lightfoot, but I never got to see him.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Adding, “I love him. I would just like to go and meet him backstage and say: ‘Thank you. You’ve given many, many hours of joy in my life. And you’ve been an inspiration to me,’ and just to let him know how much I care for what he did, and you know how much it meant to me.”
It’s not as easy for Joel to incorporate the same things Lightfoot did into his music, but they are certainly there if you know where to look for them. Part of what made Lightfoot so great is how he made everything a bit more subtle, and there’s a lot of that subtlety in the way that Joel constructed his melodies, especially on records like Streetlife Serenader, where he was closer to a singer-songwriter than just about any other record in his discography.
Now that Lightfoot has long since departed, though, all we have now are the great tunes that he has left us with. Not every one of them was going to be a slam dunk, and some people might only know him for that one song about a ship, but anyone who has ever been interested in the nitty-gritty of songwriting owes it to themselves to study what a song like ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ was all about.
