The song Billy Joel wrote to spite his manager: “It was a nightmare”

Posted On January 7, 2025January 7, 2025

Every major artist who has ever lived normally has one or two horror stories about the business side of things. Either being screwed over by the label or someone wanting to take all of their money for themselves, it tends to be a living nightmare for musicians to do what is, in essence, their dream profession. While Billy Joel always had a professional attitude towards songwriting, that didn’t stop him from airing out a lot of his pent-up aggression when writing one of his later records.

But Joel’s rise to the top wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, either. For the first three albums, it wasn’t clear whether he was going to be the next major singer-songwriter or become a glorified one-hit wonder once ‘Piano Man’ started taking off. And even when The Stranger managed to hit it big, it wasn’t like all of the problems that he had when he was still scrounging for sales was going to disappear.

If anything, that meant that everything was about to start speeding up, which meant that a lot more middlemen came into play. Although Joel kept some of his family fairly close to the chest when making his first major business decisions, bringing in Frank Weber as his manager turned out to be a recipe for disaster as soon as he entered the 1980s.

Then again, it’s not like Joel needed to worry about dwindling sales by that time. He was now happily married to Christie Brinkley, and when looking through the massive hits that came from An Innocent Man, he had reached the kind of success that would make most people start throwing around money for no good reason. Once he had time to calm down and look after his newborn daughter, though, he had a lot of time to look at what Weber was doing in the background.

Since The Bridge was far from his most enduring piece, Joel thought it was time to look at what Weber was doing and found him doing shady business dealings behind his back. The manager may have still had all the power, but Joel was about to spend the next few months in court with Weber, eventually suing him for $90 million for damages to his career. And for someone who had written heartfelt songs for most of his career, Storm Front proved that anger is as good an inspiration as love.

When talking about recording the album, Joel remembered that he wrote half the tunes in an attempt to get back Weber for what he had done to him, saying, “It was a nightmare, but it made for good material. This was trauma, this was drama, that’s why the album ended up being called Storm Front: There’s a storm front comin’.”

While the title track does have that nightmarish feel to it, a lot of what turns up on the record tends to be fairly harmless. There are hints of anger in a song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, but given how everything is structured, it’s like the listener is going through the process alongside Joel, eventually building to ‘And So It Goes’ with its gentle melody that lets us all know that even though there had been miles put on Joel’s heart, he survived the storm and would live to see another day.

But let this be a lesson for any manager or middleman who thinks that they can milk whatever talent that they are representing for all they’re worth. Those songs may earn you a ton of money, but if you find yourself on the wrong end of the lyric, it’s easy for those cash cows to use their tunes as weapons.

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