‘The Scrimshaw Pieces’: the mysterious tale of the symphonic masterpiece Billy Joel never released

Posted On August 31, 2025August 31, 2025

It’s quite ironic that Billy Joel dubbed himself as the ‘Piano Man’ given that he later admitted: “I’m not that good a pianist.” But the point is that he dared to dream.

Mastering the genres of rock and pop is one thing, but there inevitably comes a point in one’s career when, after too many hits to count, the river of inspiration eventually runs dry. In Joel’s case, when that moment came, he turned his head in a perhaps unexpected direction – towards the canon of classical music.

In the end, this manifested in a standalone classical record of compositions titled Fantasies and Delusions, which Joel released in 2001 and still stands today as his most recent record. But naturally, for a musician so accustomed to constant sonic ideas whirring round his head, there had been constant muses and previous conceptions which floated through his mind before reaching this point. One of them was The Scrimshaw Pieces.

As is the artist’s talent, Joel took inspiration from anywhere and everywhere in creating new sonic muses. For the part of his classical brainwave, it was an unassuming novel called Men’s Lives, written by Peter Matthiessen in the late 1980s, that truly piqued his interest. As he later explained in an interview in 1998: “There was supposed to be a movie loosely based on the book but nothing ever happened. I just went along and wrote pieces, motifs, based on the idea of the building of the region, the farmers and the fisherman.”

Like a true symphony, there were also movements to the piece. “There’s an 1800s section, a 1700s section, it’s all based on the history of the area,” Joel explained. “I call these fragments ‘The Scrimshaw Pieces’, because essentially this area was built on the bones of whales.” But spouting this idea into the air was all well and good – it needed some proper gravitas in order to work, and this is where the rock star somewhat came up short.

Admittedly, this was not lost on Joel, as he admitted: “I need to have it orchestrated, arranged for orchestra, but that’s a pretty ambitious thing to do. What I’m really hoping to do at this point is build a large volume of compositions of smaller pieces.”

Also, typically, what’s the secret to a musical masterpiece? Knowing what you’re doing, for one. “I don’t know if I’m going to be the one recording this stuff even ‘cause I’m not that good a pianist,” he conceded. “I’m great at rock and roll, but I suck at classical.”

This perhaps goes some way in explaining why The Scrimshaw Pieces never truly lifted off the ground – the definition of someone having all the gear but no idea. It’s not to discredit Joel’s efforts, because he clearly was able to craft this yearning for classical into something meaningful, as Fantasies and Delusions arrived not long after.

But as far as The Scrimshaw Pieces went, as a vast musical ode to the sweeping scores of history, that was a project ultimately left to gather dust in the locked-away boxes of Joel’s back catalogue of non-starters. You never know – in his new slower pace of life, he could be hatching a fresh classical plan, but it’s clear that ultimately he decided hammering out ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ on stage a few more times was a far better look.

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