Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Still Billy Joel to Me Part 2
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
So, sure—Billy Joel’s first Top 40 hit, way back in 1974, was “Piano Man,” and the nickname stuck. But for a guy who became famous sitting behind 88 keys, few of his biggest hits are really piano songs. In fact, on all three of his No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, keyboards are not the primary instrument.
The truth is, Joel isn’t the Piano Man, he’s the pastiche man. He has openly admitted to borrowing genre tropes, vocal styles, and even specific song hooks from his Baby Boom-era heroes, from Ray Charles to the Beatles to the Supremes. He’s been a jazzy crooner, a saloon balladeer, an anthem rocker, even a pseudo-punk. And on his most hit-packed album, he literally tried on a different song mode on every single—and was rewarded for it. This month, Hit Parade breaks down the uncanny success of pop magpie Billy Joel, the guy who would try anything for a hit: the next phase, new wave, dance craze, any ways.
Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch and Kevin Bendis
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening Ad-Free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:14.4 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:23.3 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number |
| 0:28.8 | One series? On our last episode, we covered the first decade of Billy Joel's career. |
| 0:35.9 | Yes, he was the piano man, but really, Joel was the pastiche |
| 0:41.6 | man, borrowing styles and melodic tropes, sometimes down to the same beat from both contemporary |
| 0:49.3 | artists and hitmakers from his youth. We are now up to the early 80s, |
| 0:55.8 | and Joel is about to turn this trick from subtext into text. |
| 1:01.5 | He was going to mine his musical past openly to generate hits. |
| 1:13.3 | Across 12 years and seven albums, |
| 1:17.3 | Billy Joel had tried to be his own version of Elton John, the Ronnets, |
| 1:22.8 | Ray Charles, and Bruce Springsteen. |
| 1:25.2 | He'd paid homage to both Lennon and McCartney, and echoed the Ramones, |
| 1:31.0 | Queen, Randy Newman, even Gary Newman. Entering 1983, Joel had a new idea. What if he packed |
| 1:40.7 | a range of musical personae into a single album? What if on every track he was, in essence, |
| 1:49.9 | a different artist from the past? This concept led to Billy Joel's most hit-packed LP ever, |
| 1:58.6 | an album that improbably made the 34-year-old one of the top stars of the early |
| 2:05.9 | MTV era. He called the album an innocent man. In virtual In virtually every way, |
| 2:22.9 | 1983's An Innocent Man was an antidote to the nylon curtain, |
| 2:29.6 | ebullient where its predecessor had been dower, |
| 2:33.3 | blatantly accessible where its predecessor had been dour, blatantly accessible, where its predecessor had been thorny and experimental. |
| 2:39.1 | Simply put, Billy Joel was in a great mood. For starters, he was in a new romance, dating his future second wife, |
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