Billy Joel's Retirement from Pop/Rock

Billy has the best gig in rock. Plays sold out shows whenever he wants more mountains of cash, usually locally at MSG, and he doesn’t have to worry about making new music. His last few albums weren’t that good anyway, his legacy to me is his ‘73-‘83 albums and his crowd pleasing “greatest hits” live shows.

 

I'm going to preface this by saying I despise Billy Joel's music. Just not my thing. BUT his decision to walk away was in many ways quite brilliant. I was working in radio at the time River of Dreams was out. We played the hell out of that record. But within three years Clear Channel was poised to take over and ruin American radio. The Adult Contemporary stations that played his new music began to disappear as boy bands and the Brittany Spears types took over the airwaves. Sure an artist of his stature might have been able to break thru and get airplay but it's doubtful. I admire the legacy artists who continue to put out new music but getting it heard over the last 20 plus years is a frustrating battle. Billy Joel probably saved himself a lot of frustration by deciding just to become a legacy act. Much less stress.

 

You know...……..Billy Joel is one of those musicians I've never been able to connect with...…….I'm not sure why exactly. I own many of albums but very rarely give them a spin. He has always seemed to be a very intelligent, self aware fellow, that knows the music business, and how to read the tea leaves. I admire those who are able to walk away.

 

I saw him in concert a few years back, and there was a fire and passion in him that is rare to see in a performer. After a tremendous show, I walked out thinking his "retirement" was one of the biggest wastes of talent I'd ever seen.

Taking a break after River of Dreams was definitely a wise choice. It had some great moments, and some... not so great. Stepping back and recharging made sense.

But he's a man completely at odds with himself, and it has tied him up in knots. He is caught in a triangle of who he is expected to be (pop balladeer), who he thinks he needs to be to be a true success (respected composer of "serious" music), and who he _wants_ to be (full out rocker).

He took a swing at Classical, and, at best, hit a single. That destroyed him.

So, he took the easy way out.

Look, if that fire hadn't been so obvious, then I would say he made the right choice. But that is a man with something still to say. He's just scared that if he goes back and releases something new, and it's not a huge critical and commercial success it will prove that he's not worthy.

Personally, I'd love to hear him tap into the guy that wrote No Man's Land again, strip out all the "production", and rage on the world. It'll never happen, but it should.

 

Extremely well said. Probably the best analysis of BJ I've read post RoD. It's probably why, in recent years, he's dug deep into the album cuts in creating his setlist. He doesn't have to write new music, but he can un-earth some of the forgotten songs to show he's more than just the hits. Without it being labeled "new material." It's new in the sense that he rarely played it, and many aren't familiar with it.

 

You know he's probably written quite a few songs since he stopped recording, and many of them are probably great. But maybe he does not want to release them because they don't fit in with the modern music mold, he knows that no matter how great those songs are they will not get exposure, and the sales figures will be far below his numbers in the past.

Putting out great work and having it ignored or blasted as being "stuck in the past" or "not as good as his older work" (which is almost automatic) is just not worth it.

I'm not saying he has or hasn't written, or has or had the thoughts I wrote above - I'm just throwing it out there.

 

These are the last words I have to say
That's why this took so long to write
There will be other words some other day
But that's the story of my life...

He does not exactly rule out writing some more, but on any view, the if, when, time and place will be of his choosing.

 

I suspect he knows any new music will be met with a yawn in the marketplace and the arena, so why bother?

Crafting an entire studio album to his standards only to have it sell, I dunno, ten-thousand physical units in the current market, wouldn't even cover its catering bill.

 

I believe he has said this in an interview or two but I don’t know the source.

So it may be out there what you said only in Billy‘s own words.

So I’m convinced he’s still composing....

 

Those other guys still write songs. You don’t. What does that say about your relationship to making music compared to theirs?

Like I said, I couldn’t be as good as I wanted to be. I was always trying to feel like there was a real progression in my work, and eventually I realized I was only going to be X good. Because of that I knew I was going to beat myself up for not being better. So I stopped. That’s it.

You knew you were done 25 years ago?

I suppose inherently. The last song on River of Dreams is “Famous Last Words.” I’d realized that if a song wasn’t a hit single it didn’t matter, and I didn’t want to go in that direction. And look, it’s one thing if you own your recordings. I don’t. There was supposed to be a reversal of copyright back to me in 2013. Well, the record company dug in and got their battery of lawyers and we never got the stuff back. So I still don’t own my recordings. People wonder why there’ve been so many Billy Joel live albums and compilations. They’re not my idea. The record company owns all these recordings and can package them any way they want. As far as I’m concerned, I did 12 studio albums. The live crap and all these compilations — they don’t mean anything.

If You Think Billy Joel Will Never Write Another Song, You May Be Right

 

This New York Times interview (July 2018) seems to say at all.

Billy Joel’s Got a Good Job and Hits in His Head

 

Billy Joel has taken an advance to write an autobiography, then wrote an autobiography, and then...returned the advance. He's done this more than once. I think he is a very troubled artist, and has claimed more than once of having been suicidal. Whatever deep writer's block he has is profound and, I imagine, it bothers him deeply.

He delivered joyous, smart and infectiously melodic songs for decades. He made very few compromises. Still, if we ever get that autobiography, I think we will see him as being ceaselessly tormented by multiple demons.

 

Smart decision.

Plenty of hits to keep him going.

 

Has anyone read the Billy bio that came out a couple years ago? Any good? I thought I'd heard that parts of it were actually repurposed from Joel's own book that he took back, but I could be wrong about that.

 

An Innocent Man SOUNDED like a covers album.

 

He actually did attempt suicide in right before he wrote/recorded Cold Spring Harbor. Tomorrow is Today is about that.

I grew up on Long Island. Billy Joel is in our daily lives for better or worse. I was always a fan, but he's a lot more than the hits. Piano Man isn't even the best song on Piano Man.

Cold Spring Harbor is always the album that I keep going back to. It's butchered to hell (recorded at the wrong speed and then chopped to bits on the 83 reissue by Artie Ripp), but you can find a corrected version of the original version out there.

I'm saddened that he decided to walk away from music, but I admire his commitment to leaving while he was still on top. I imagine he was a bit like Dylan, hated the studio process in the 80s and 90s. Maybe one day he'll come back and surprise us, but honestly, I think he's having a lot of fun doing what he's doing now.

 

Honestly, I'm kinda glad he didn't. And if he did now, he's not strong enough vocally to make it interesting. But thinking back on the Beatles/McCartney covers he's done, or the Dylan one on the Russia album, or the filler stuff on the last disc of My Lives, they basically sound the same as the originals, just with Billy singing. I love Billy singing Billy Joel songs, but he's not an interesting enough vocalist to make a covers album very interesting, and with maybe one or two exceptions, I've never heard him drastically re-arrange another song to where his cover version stands on its own. I suppose if it was a whole album full of obscurities and deep cuts like "You Got Me Hummin'" it'd at least serve the purpose of introducing new fans to those songs (kind of like the recent Stones album), but that'd be the only way it'd really be interesting, I suppose.

 

Recently heard him do "Maybe I'm Amazed" - I thought it was old but it was actually from a recent McCartney tribute album. He's a big vocal imitator. I often wish he'd do songs how he feels them rather than trying to emulate the original vocalist/style.

 

It didn't help that he was recording that with McCartney's band, who was basically playing the song the exact same way they do with Macca (albeit in a lower key, which Macca should really do). It's totally fine, but I heard it once and I'm like, "okay, this was probably fun for Billy but there's no real reason to listen to it a bunch of times."

If he'd done one with his 70's band at the peak of their powers, it might've clicked. That band belongs in the conversation next to E-Street and the Heartbreakers as far as backing bands that elevated themselves to something much greater than the sum of their parts.

 

I agree that Joel's covers are all kind of meh or worse...

In retrospect, Joel probably got out at the right time: His last album was still a big hit, and spawned real hit singles.

In only a few years, Napster would appear, the music biz would crumble, and the era of big hit albums by legacy artists was pretty much over.

Much as I'd love to hear a new album from Joel, no matter how good it was, it would open at #1 but fall off the charts in a few weeks, and physical sales would be nominal. Any new songs would not get slotted into pop playlists. His fans would be thrilled, and it would give him new material to play live (if he returns to live playing after COVID)--and that is probably the biggest value right there. But, given all the effort it would take to record an album, and given that he retired with a perfect track record of all hit albums (of varying degrees) starting with The Stranger, I imagine the idea of releasing a blink-and-its-gone album to the marketplace holds little allure.

 

You're implying the only reason to make a record is for commercial success or to make a bunch of money. (Billy doesn't need either)

I'd hate to think about McCartney or Springsteen or Dylan or Petty (among others) not having made any music in the past 20 years. I mean, yeah, it sucks that mainstream audiences stop listening to new music in their 30's and just want to hear the same crap over and over again, but there isn't much anyone can do about that. But you can still make music for the people who care, and just as importantly, for yourself. Also, recording an album isn't a huge effort anymore, the way it was in the old days. I mean, if Billy was going to make an album at this point, just get him, Liberty (since they're apparently on better terms now, even if they aren't playing together), a bassist and guitarist in the studio and knock out the songs with minimal overdubs in a month, Turnstiles style. He makes enough from one MSG gig to fund an entire album recording.

 

I have tickets to his September 11, 2020 show in Cincinnati.

It's been postponed to September 10, 2021.

Here's to hoping it happens and it's a great show. I've never seen him live before. Anything more is just a cherry on the ice cream.

 

I would like to hear an album of new material written for his mature voice. With everything that’s going on, I’m sure Billy has things to say. He’s never been shy about speaking his mind.

If it’s true he has writer’s block, pair him with a producer that could help him get through it. A man as talented as Billy Joel never completely runs out of ideas.

 

He's been writing classical music for years and years now. He's made it clear he's done writing pop. I always got the impression he felt it was beneath him, or that it could never live up to the music he loves, classical, of which his father was a musician of.

 

He doesnt have writers block. Its clear he’s done writing pop songs on a commercial level but not done Composing actual music. He just lost the desire to be a “song writer”.