Speaking of ol' Billy:
http://flagpole.com/articles.php?fp=BillyJoel
Just The Way He Is
Billy Joel Doesn’t Write Songs About Perfect Love, And That’s Why He Can Write Perfect Songs About Love
It may just be the product of some hotel room haze, but I swear somewhere in the dense thicket of sound bites that constitutes the modern VH1, there’s a segment in which they make fun of Billy Joel for writing a song called “Just the Way You Are” for a woman he would later divorce. But this is a lie only if every love song is a lie. Ol’ Bill was just being honest: he loved her just the way she was, at the time. Then she changed, and he divorced her. At least he was upfront about it.
There are lots of Billy Joel songs about love (although, arguably, less per capita than many pop songwriters). But there’s something particular about the songs that aren’t about how two people are in love, or how someone else is lovely - the songs that are about how he, Billy Joel, is in love. Those songs seem less interested in the ecstasy of love than its rainy days, and are never more than half complimentary, always most open when they’re stating the obvious: “She’s Always a Woman to Me.” Well, of course she is. It’s expressing love while giving as little away as possible, and in that way displays a remarkable openness about what loving Billy Joel is like. Hidden somewhere in every love song is an admission that love will end, and Joel’s first-person love songs foreground this relentlessly.
Even when presented with a jaunty uptempo swing, as in “Only the Good Die Young,” it’s with the self-loathing charge that the object of Joel’s affection couldn’t be so great, because otherwise she’d be dead already. The only way he can escape it is to dress it up in period clothes as he did with “Uptown Girl,” his paean to Christie Brinkley. If there’s anything like honesty in pop music, you’ll find it not in self-centered expressions of heartbreak, but in Joel’s quiet insistence that he’ll never really get that close to you. That might not be true for everyone, but it sure seems true for Billy.
In this way, his love songs resemble his first hit “Piano Man,” maybe the most perfect expression of bathos the pop canon has to offer. The sadness feels outsized and all-consuming, but it’s located in commonplace details like the sour smell of a microphone. Joel’s love songs seek to capture the bathos and banality of love, something that’s inevitably present in any expression of love, if for no other reason than it’s delivered with the imperfect human voice, and, sadly, seems to be almost the sole subject of most short literary fiction these days.
Pop tends to shove this to the sideline, and that’s fine; for those of us, however, that enjoy the getting-to-know-you montage parts of romantic comedies - particularly those of us that fall prey to the small smiles induced by well-executed musical sequences involving biking and eating ice cream can offer - it’s something too often mentioned in passing.
Maybe this is because it’s so hard to capture without falling into the bad kind of bathos, the kind that wants to legitimate itself through merely being depressing, instead of performing the small miracles of balancing that Joel does so well in his best first-person love songs (and even some of his third-person ones, like “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” which you can put up against Springsteen’s “Glory Days” if you want to see bad bathos vs. good bathos in action).
Banality, of course, is mainly what constitutes love: not flirting or fighting or making up, but doing dishes, running errands, watching TV. You probably spend more time sleeping next to your significant other than you spend doing anything else, and what makes this Being In Love and not Taking A Nap is what happens when you wake up a little, that silent warm feeling in your stomach when you hear their breathing beside you and feel their cold foot half-consciously trying to snag your calf. You might not remember it the next morning, but what matters is that it happens.
Love is defined by the spaces in between, by the times when you retreat into yourself, because the thing that draws you back also draws you out. That’s love, and defining this absence and its significance for the whole condition of being in love is what Billy Joel accomplishes better than anyone else.
There’s no denying that Billy Joel can be over the top, and that for every time this works, there’s another time it’s embarrassingly bad. But, especially in his earlier albums, those times that he talks about what it’s like for him, personally, specifically, to be in love? Those are times you can take to the bank.
Michael Barthel
