The artist Billy Joel said was too big to compete with: “He changed everything”

Posted On February 5, 2026February 5, 2026

Writing songs always seems to be like pulling teeth for Billy Joel.

His music remains some of the most iconic pop music of his time, but it’s not like all of his melodies fell out of the sky every single time he sat down at the piano. He wanted the chance to make something that was going to be set in stone forever, but it’s not like he was alone in trying to create timeless melodies when he first got started.

You have to remember that this was the era of the singer-songwriter, and while Joel didn’t have a guitar in his hand like James Taylor or Cat Stevens, he wanted to be that kind of storyteller every time he sat behind the piano. ‘Piano Man’ may have been the proof of concept for his entire career, but across every one of his albums, there’s usually one or two songs that take you on a journey in only a few minutes, whether that’s wondering about whatever happened to Brenda and Eddie in ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ or the bitter writer trying to make ends meet like ‘The Entertainer’.

Even Joel would tell you that he didn’t knock it out of the park every single time, but not all songwriters could. Lennon and McCartney had the odd tune that happened to be filler on an album every now and again, and Jagger and Richards would say that they worked hard before getting the first authentic Stones songs, but once Bob Dylan entered the pop charts, you could feel a sea change in the way that everyone started writing.

Because Dylan never claimed to be a true rock and roll star when making tunes like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’. He did have great aspirations to play with people like Little Richard, but when he opened his mouth, everyone was dumbfounded by what they heard. He didn’t have the greatest voice of them all, but it was insane to think that a three-minute pop song was able to capture so much emotion and speak to the times so succinctly. 

‘Like A Rolling Stone’ might not have been the heaviest song that anyone had ever heard, but as soon as he embraced electric instruments, people started to pay more attention to what he had to say. There weren’t that many chords to a lot of his songs, but every songwriter that came afterwards was going to be referencing everything from ‘Ballad of A Thin Man’ to ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ to measure their own masterpieces against when they walked back into the studio.

But even with all of the dense harmony that Joel had in his songs, he felt that no one on Earth could manage to equal what Dylan could do, saying, “Dylan is so titanic. It’s very hard to compare anything else to Bob Dylan because he’s iconic. He changed everything. I remember when I first heard him I thought, ‘What’s with this guy’s voice?’ He was a folk singer, and they don’t sing beautifully.”

Then again, the true mark of Dylan’s genius is that he never fully stopped making strides to write the next great song. Nothing was good enough for him, and even when he tried to shake off his celebrity with Self Portrait, people were always interested to hear his take on life, staying with him through his broken heart on Blood on the Tracks or his brush with mortality on Time Out of Mind.

Joel’s music was a little bit more sophisticated than what Dylan could do, but it’s not like he was ever trying to write a song to replace ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ or even ‘It’s Alright Ma’. They were simply too perfect to mess with, and even when he did his own renditions of Dylan’s music, he wanted to make sure that he wasn’t going to be in competition with the original when making ‘To Make You Feel My Love’.

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