The album Billy Joel called a “big departure from my earlier style”
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(Credits: Far Out / Columbia Records)
Most of us know Billy Joel as the hit-making force behind party playlist favourites like ‘Uptown Girl’ and ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. We know him as the “Piano Man” who created more tender, twinkling offerings like ‘Vienna’ and ‘She’s Always A Woman’. But we don’t really know him as a complex songwriter. We don’t consider him an innovative sonic experimentalist or a particularly profound lyricist.
That’s not to say that Joel never tried to expand his songwriting in those areas. On his 1982 record, The Nylon Curtain, he looked to push his writing into weightier lyrical topics. On the opening track, ‘Allentown’, for example, Joel investigates the factory closures and resulting restlessness in the title town, while ‘Goodnight Saigon’ saw Joel pushing further into politics with anti-war sentiments.
Instrumentally, too, the record saw Joel pushing beyond the boundaries of his earlier hits. ‘Goodnight Saigon’ featured crickets and crashing drums, ‘Surprises’ opened with strange synthesisers, and ‘Pressure’ found Joel delving into new wave stylings. The record pushed Joel outside of his comfort zone both in lyrics and in instrumentation and, as a result, it has been remembered as one of his finest efforts.
However, Joel decided not to lean into this newfound sonic complexity and, instead, opted to go in the opposite direction for his next record. Joel and his wife, Elizabeth Weber Small, had split up not long before the release of The Nylon Curtain and the songwriter suddenly found himself back amidst the dating scene. This would inspire his next record, which returned to more carefree, youthful styles.
“I wanted to have a good time on the next recording,” Joel recalled to Sirius XM in 2016, “As it turns out, I was newly divorced, I was dating Christie Brinkley and Elle Macpherson. I was having a fun time, I felt like a teenager again.” This return to youthful excitement in his personal life bled into Joel’s writing and studio sessions as he shrugged off weightier topics for a bouncy rock and roll record.
Joel stated that he wanted to “recapture that feeling by writing songs that were stylistically from that era,” suggesting that he pulled from the more “lighthearted” rock of the late 1950s and early 1960s. “It was a big departure from my earlier style to a lot of people,” he admitted, “but it was a lot of fun.”
The result of his efforts was An Innocent Man, a jubilant collection of rock and doo-wop. It spawned one of Joel’s biggest hits in ‘Uptown Girl’, which captured the songwriter’s newfound excitement in dating through cheery pop rock. The record also featured the gorgeously harmonised ‘The Longest Time’, the soul-infused ‘Tell Her About It’, and the classic rock and roller ‘Christie Lee’.
The record diverged from the soft piano stylings that had characterised Joel’s earlier work when he spent his days playing the instrument at local venues in Los Angeles. It also diverged from his heavier efforts on The Nylon Curtain, as Joel looked to shrug off weightier topics and more experimental instrumentation in favour of something more playful.
In line with the youthful, excitable feelings Joel was experiencing behind the scenes, An Innocent Man took him in a new direction once more. It would have been interesting to see what Joel might have done had he leant even further into complexity in his sound, but then we might never have had ‘Uptown Girl’.
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