The career of Billy Joel is filled with mega-hits but there are bound to be a few moments that fall short of his high standards. Joel is regarded as one of the best songwriters of his generation. He has earned the admiration of some of the pop world’s best, including Paul McCartney. He has delivered a slew of unforgettable moments for the music world. But there are two tracks in particular that Joel would rather relegate to the dustbin of history.
Songs like ‘Vienna‘, ‘Moving Out‘, ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant‘, and ‘Only the Good Die Young‘ is of high quality. But, even with such a high bar, few were expecting Joel to claim he’d like to edit around “25%” of his back catalog out and leave them on the cutting room floor. “I’ve written some real stinkers I wish I could take back,” he told the LA Times in 2023.
During the conversation, Joel quickly pointed out two tracks he disliked. Joel chose two particularly wretch-inducing contributions. 1989‘s Storm Front cut ‘When in Rome‘ and the forgettable 1980 song ‘C’était Toi‘ from the same year’s Glass Houses. Sometimes I’d get six or seven songs that I thought were pretty damn good. It is followed by a couple of squeeze-outs at the end to fill out the album.”
Those two songs will rarely be at the top of any fan’s list of favorite songs. But Joel’s regret is not limited to the forgettable moments in his discography. ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ is arguably one of Joel’s biggest hits, but it did not escape criticism. In reaction to John Lennon’s son, Sean, the artist released the track in 1989. Alongside his friend, he lamented that the former had stiffed their generation. Things kicked into overdrive for Joel’s creative mind when Lennon’s friend claimed that he’d had it easy because “everyone knows that nothing happened in the ’50s”.
The comment served as a starting pistol, and Joel’s mind raced into gear. It resulted in a stream-of-consciousness song that still echoes across the airwaves today. “I started with Harry Truman because in 1949, the year I was born, Harry Truman was president,” Joel told me. “From there, it kind of wrote itself.”
However, perhaps as a result of this hands-off approach to songwriting, Joel later expressed regret for the song. During a Q&A session, Joel criticized the track’s melody. He said, “When you take the melody by itself, it’s terrible,” and called it “one of the worst melodies I ever wrote.”
Billy Joel’s 1973 hit ‘Piano Man,’ a song sung in every piano bar around the world ever since defined him. Joel discovered the song’s foundations in a Los Angeles bar called The Executive Room. “It was a gig I did for about six months just to pay rent. I was living in Los Angeles and trying to get out of a bad record contract that I had signed. I worked under an alias, the Piano Stylings of Bill Martin, and simply bullshitted my way through.”
For Joel, the song’s popularity is a mystery because he considers it one of his. worst “I have no idea why that song became so popular.” It’s like a karaoke favorite. The melody is not very good and very repetitious, while the lyrics are like limericks. It shocked and embarrassed me when it became a hit. But my songs are like my kids, and I look at that song and think: ‘My kid did pretty well‘”.
The Billy Joel songs Billy Joel hates
- ‘When in Rome’
- ‘C’était Toi’
- ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’
- ‘Piano Man’
