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Ryan Raul Bañagale and Joshua S. Duchan

This book started as a social media post in July 2015. Ryan shared a link with a few music scholars and a message hoping “to someday collaborate on a Billy Joel conference of some sort.” It did not take long for a symposium to materialize once Josh came on board as co-organizer. Because only a small handful of academics had written previously on Billy Joel topics, we invited scholars from musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, history, comparative literature, and related fields to submit proposals applying to Joel’s music the approaches they used in their work on other subjects. In October 2016, two dozen academics and three hundred audience members convened at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado for a two-day exploration of all things Billy Joel: “‘It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me’: The Music and Lyrics of Billy Joel.” It marked the first music-focused academic symposium to consider Joel and his career.¹ And accordingly, it generated a lot of interest. The American Musicological Society was a sponsor. The New York Times reported on the event, as did several internet media outlets.² Even Joel, himself, participated. The keynote event consisted of a live, phone interview with the Piano Man, during which he responded to questions raised by the conference presenters and in the discussions following the presentations.

Our Billy Joel symposium offered an additional twist to the traditional scholarly conference. Joel is a consummate singer-songwriter, whose compositions translate larger cultural concerns into accessible and compelling musical narratives. In that spirit, it was important to us that the symposium embrace the concept of “public musicology,” the goal of which is to engage general audiences in intellectually oriented considerations of music in a way that is understandable to nonspecialists. Such an approach is by no means new and there remains little consensus on its modes of operation, but it has become an ever-important outcome of the academic activities of music scholars in recent years.³ The essays included in this book began with this idea and reveal how projects that debut in a public forum can move productively toward more academic outcomes.

Joel’s music plays an important role in millions of people’s lives, including those of the contributors to this volume, especially the editors. Indeed, Joel’s music has long fascinated us both, almost in parallel ways despite growing up in different parts of the country. As children of the 1980s, we were nurtured by a mixture of greatest hits and album tracks. Each phase of life was accompanied by a different set of iconic songs: as children we were raised by (an) “Uptown Girl” and “An Innocent Man,” the world opened up to us as adolescents through “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and “Leningrad,” and in our angsty teenage years we navigated a “River of Dreams” through “No Man’s Land.” Likewise, Joel’s music occupied our early musical training, sometimes to the chagrin of our more classically inclined piano teachers. But we could each be found performing his songs wherever eighty-eight keys might be available. Ryan played “Where’s the Orchestra?” at a high school theater cast party and sang “The Longest Time” to his high school girlfriend, while Josh belted out “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” for a middle school talent show and performed “I’ve Loved These Days” as part of his high school graduation.

Yet as we made our way into academia, Joel remained extracurricular. As the grunge- and jam-band music of millennium’s end gave way to hip-hop and EDM (Electronic Dance Music), it was decidedly uncool to listen to his music (maybe some had always thought it was). Of course, none of these genres were found in our music history textbooks. American and popular music courses during our college years completely omitted Joel. As we progressed into our graduate studies, both of us were told “no” when we proposed writing master’s theses on Joel. We were fed typical gatekeeping excuses centering on the fact that he was either not significant enough or too “popular” to qualify as the subject of scholarly inquiry. Josh’s solution was to ensure that all the examples in his thesis on musical semiotics were drawn from Joel’s songs. Ryan turned toward the works of George Gershwin, an integral figure in the “Great American Songbook,” which, at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2013, Tony Bennett proposed should include Joel.

The fact that Joel has not been all that eager to talk about his legacy might have seemed, to some music scholars, reason enough to ignore him. Aside from a handful of studies and books (mostly mass-market biographies), his music is usually mentioned only in passing, if at all, in music history textbooks—even in popular music history texts.⁴ The first musicological articles on Joel began to appear near the turn of the twenty-first century with music theorist Walter Everett’s groundbreaking piece in Contemporary Music Review, which focused on the mixture and juxtaposition of “learned” and “vernacular” styles in Joel’s songs.⁵ Other articles and book chapters followed.⁶ Soon, scholarly monographs joined the growing body of literature.⁷

Still, Joel is a conundrum for popular music studies. The American singer-songwriter’s middle-of-the-road appeal marks his creative output as seemingly myopic when viewed through the critical-theory lenses typically employed by scholars in the field. Such approaches consider popular music as an object or process, a form of personal or group identity, political or cultural expression, a reflection or constitutive component of culture, and so on. This range of critical perspectives often (but not always) sheds the methods traditionally developed for the Western classical tradition, with each analytical approach contributing to a broader conception of the style or genre to which it is applied. However, despite the plethora of possibilities for analysis, the field has not yet embraced Joel’s work in similarly broad contexts. And, except in limited cases, analysis rooted in the Western tradition has rarely been applied to Joel’s pieces.

After all, what is the significance of Joel’s music? One measurement of economic and, perhaps, social significance can be found in sales figures and industry awards. Indeed, Joel is one of the best-selling popular musicians in the United States, whose accolades include over 150 million records sold, thirty-three Top-40 hits, six Grammy awards and twenty-three nominations, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the 2014 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress. His current “residency” at New York City’s Madison Square Garden—begun in 2014 and at which he plays monthly concerts until demand dissipates—continues unabated and stands as further evidence of his enduring popular appeal. These accomplishments hint at the sheer number of listeners who have, at one time or another, engaged with Joel’s music.

Another kind of significance is cultural and historical. Joel’s life and career map neatly onto the American postwar experience: he was born in 1949, grew up in one of the country’s first suburbs, was entranced by Beatlemania, and played in local garage bands as a teenager. He embarked upon his professional career intending to write songs for others but ended up a singer-songwriter in the mold of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. Similar to that of his contemporaries, Joel’s music offers commentary on American life and culture rooted in both his personal experience and the time during which it was composed. Unlike his peers, however, Joel’s music expands beyond the confessional strictures of the singer-songwriter genre to embrace a wide variety of styles and influences while addressing topics well beyond the personal, such as gender, class, politics, and history itself.

If Joel has been significant economically, socially, culturally, and historically, then it is time to more thoroughly include him and his works in broader scholarly conversations about (American and/or popular) music. Moreover, we believe that Joel and his works hold important lessons for those engaged in such conversations. “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies is intended to serve as a model for how any scholar can approach the study of popular music, regardless of methodological proclivities. This edited volume takes a diversity of approaches as its foundation, including those not traditionally found within popular musicological studies alongside those that usually are. And its application of various methods and viewpoints to the music and career of a single artist focuses that effort within a timely and comprehensible frame.

As it includes the multidisciplinary scholarship emerging from the 2016 conference, this volume addresses a broad range of questions that arise when considering Joel’s music:

 What makes music important? How is the significance of sound understood by audiences, critics, and scholars in a variety of contexts?

 How do we frame our experience of the world around us through popular music? How does methodology illuminate aspects of compositional processes, musical output, reception, and legacy? How does music shape individual visions of society? Who gets to give voice to opinions and perspectives?

 How does popular music serve as a stand-in for the American experience, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century? How are representations of that experience encoded by the music, lyrics, recording, and performance? What role can/do academics play in exploring such representations?

To tackle these questions, this book’s chapters are organized and grouped into themes. (Although in the multifaceted way Joel’s music appeals to a wide range of listeners, many chapters fit into more than one theme.) Readers can enjoy them from start to finish, or one theme group—or even a single chapter—at a time. In Part I, “‘Somewhere Along the Line’: Considering Tradition,” each chapter examines Joel’s work as part of a wider tradition of music-making in the popular style. In the first, Josh Duchan discusses issues of influence between the Beatles and Joel, while in the second, Jack Sheinbaum sets the imagery of Joel’s works alongside that of another popular artist to whom he is often compared, Bruce Springsteen.

The chapters in Part II, “‘This Is the Time’: Performance Analysis,” attend to issues of composition and musicality. In chapter 3, Jonathan Bellman situates Joel’s piano-based work within a history of popular music that overwhelmingly favors guitar-based compositions, while Don Traut illuminates, in chapter 4, the significance of a particular rhythm within Joel’s compositional technique.

Extant scholarship has established the important role of place in Joel’s oeuvre.⁸ Thus, in Part III, “‘You’re My Home’: Imagined Locations,” Morgan Jones discusses, in chapter 5, Joel’s efforts to compose folk music in order to represent Long Island fishermen. In chapter 6, Sarah Messbauer examines the strategic use of Joel’s song, “Allentown,” in the municipal branding efforts of the titular city.

Part IV, “‘Stop in Nevada’: Live Performance,” considers issues surrounding the live performance of Joel’s music. Elyse Marrero examines the challenges of interpreting Joel’s gendered lyrics in American Sign Language in chapter 7. And Stan Soocher assesses Joel’s record-breaking residency at Madison Square Garden in the context of the business of rock concerts in chapter 8.

Part V, “‘Just the Way You Are’: Arranging Billy Joel, Arranging Ourselves,” features essays that analyze Joel’s works for the ways they are used representationally. In chapter 9, Jason Hanley and Kathryn Metz consider the role of musical artifacts in music museums by showing how Joel’s compositional notebooks, on loan to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, simultaneously reveal and represent his compositional process. James Deaville examines the act of “taste shaming” and the role Joel’s music plays in this recurring (re) definition of popular preference in chapter 10. And in chapter 11, Ryan Bañagale questions the ways in which collections of Joel’s songs sold as “box sets” influence the competing legacies of an artist.

The final chapter of the volume consists of a transcript of the interview with Joel conducted during the Billy Joel Conference. While Joel has been interviewed countless times in newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and other media outlets, this transcript remains largely unedited.⁹ We offer it here as a new, raw, primary source from which students and Billy Joel scholars can draw their own conclusions. Several authors from this volume also draw on this transcript, providing a variety of models for working with interview materials.

In addition to prompting future scholarship, we hope this volume inspires pedagogical opportunities for students as they explore an expanded approach to popular music studies. Concurrent with the 2016 conference at Colorado College, Ryan offered an upper-level music history seminar—perhaps the first undergraduate course focused exclusively on Billy Joel. Taking advantage of the institution’s innovative “block plan” academic calendar, the six class members entered into an intensive three-and-a-half-week investigation of popular music using Joel as a case study. The goal was to understand the enduring presence of his music and lyrics through detailed analysis using a range of theoretical and critical approaches. Students considered the reception of Joel’s music over time—as well as various ways in which his music surfaces within popular culture—alongside the concepts of historiography, genre, and style. Learning outcomes included the abilities to describe markers of Joel’s compositional style (lyrical, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, etc.), to articulate different experiences of the same song (live/studio, staged/produced, audio/visual, etc.), and to communicate about Joel’s music in a variety of popular formats, including exhibits and podcasts.

Much like the conference, an important focus of the course was communicating academic observations in ways that would resonate with the general public. One such approach was to create an exhibit about Joel to accompany the conference. With only two weeks from the start of class to the start of the conference, the students crafted what they called “an open-ended vision from a pile of albums, images, and memorabilia.”¹⁰ Students began with a box of items acquired on the cheap from eBay and, with the support of Briget Heidmous, assistant curator of the Colorado College InderDisiplinary Experimental Arts (I.D.E.A) program, devised an interactive space that conference attendees could navigate from multiple perspectives. They asked three central questions: How do you remember Joel? Where do your perceptions of him come from? And what defines an artist and their cultural legacy? In addition to displaying a wide assortment of physical items (LPs and CDs, press packets and newspaper clippings, backstage and photo passes, etc.), they mounted a timeline along one wall featuring album art and photographs, installed a piano with Joel’s tunes notated in traditional and graphic forms, created a live-updating “word cloud” projection, and displayed a video that placed music video footage side-by-side with live performances.¹¹ A caption and one or more of four colored dots was affixed to each item in the space. By following a selection of red, blue, yellow, or green markers, patrons could explore a different theme: “A Reflective Artist: Placing Billy Joel in a Pop Culture Context,” “Venue Visions and Musician Memories: A Live Experience of Billy Joel,” “More Than Meets the Eye: Comparing the Man’s Music and Facial Expressions,” and “A Filtered Image: How the Media Has Shaped Our Understandings.” The accompanying exhibit guide explored each of these areas in greater detail as well as how they all tied together to “present different angles from which to think about Billy Joel, while leaving interpretation and conclusion largely up to the viewers.”¹² An approach the Piano Man himself might also embrace.

Before diving in, it may be useful to some readers to establish a basic outline of Billy Joel’s life and career. More detailed biographies can be found elsewhere, but this sketch should suffice.¹³ (A discography of Joel’s studio albums can be found in the volume’s back matter. Due to the frequency with which his studio albums are discussed, they are not cited individually in the chapters and are not included in each chapter’s bibliography.)

On May 9, 1949, Rosalind and Howard Joel welcomed their son, William, to the world. Soon thereafter, they moved from the Bronx, New York, to a newly developed suburb on Long Island called Hicksville. There, in a house on Meeting Lane, Billy Joel grew up, taking (and improvising his way through) piano lessons and soaking up as much music as he could by playing records and listening to the radio. In many ways, it was a typical American childhood of the 1950s—except for the fact that by 1957, a depressed and disillusioned Howard had left the family to return to Europe, leaving young Billy and his cousin, Judy, to be raised by a single mother.

Joel did not graduate with the Hicksville High School class of 1967, but his music education was well supplemented with experience in local bands, including the Echoes (later called the Lost Souls) and the Hassles. The biggest turning point, however, was seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. His world was transformed. Its most powerful force was the music, which on television both sounded exciting and rebellious, and appeared especially to excite the young women in the audience (an idea that certainly appealed to teenage Joel). After leaving the Hassles, Joel and the band’s drummer, John Small, formed a short-lived heavy metal duo, Attila.

Joel’s first solo album, Cold Spring Harbor, was released by Family Records in 1971, embodying his efforts to fashion himself a singer-songwriter (or at least a songwriter). But a catastrophic recording error rendered the vocals unnatural-sounding. Devastated, Joel decamped to Los Angeles and took a regular gig at a bar, the Executive Room. That venue became the setting for his song, “Piano Man,” the lead track on, and title of, his next album, released in 1973. Having been extracted from his agreement with Family Records and signed with Columbia Records, Joel was expected to produce a follow-up quickly. Accordingly, Streetlife Serenade was released in 1974. But despite featuring several songs that would later become fan-favorites, that album was neither a critical nor commercial success.

Turnstiles, Joel’s 1976 release, marked his return to New York and his first project recorded with his touring band, the musicians that would stick with him for a decade or more. It was arguably a turning point in Joel’s song-writing and recording career.¹⁴ Yet the album, like those before it, did not satisfy Columbia’s desire for a real hit. To help reach that goal, producer Phil Ramone, fresh off his Grammy Award-winning work on Paul Simon’s Still Crazy after All These Years, was brought in to produce Joel’s next outing, 1977’s The Stranger.

The Joel-Ramone combination worked. The Stranger made Joel a household name and was quickly followed by the similarly and spectacularly successful 52nd Street the next year. Glass Houses, released in 1980, turned away from the jazz influence of 52nd Street and toward guitar-driven tracks ready for live performance in the larger venues Joel was now booking. In 1982, Joel released The Nylon Curtain, a musically ambitious album that more fully embraced the capabilities of the recording studio and was explicitly inspired by the Beatles.¹⁵ Joel returned to his roots with An Innocent Man in 1983, offering a sonic tour through the popular music styles of his youth in the 1960s, from doo-wop to Motown. By the mid-1980s, Joel was on his second marriage and had become a father, resulting in less interest in the breakneck pace of songwriting, recording, and touring that had occupied the past decade or so. He released The Bridge in 1986, the last album on which he and Ramone would collaborate.

Following some well-publicized legal wrangling with his former manager, Joel found himself writing a new album and planning another tour to promote it. On Storm Front, released in 1989, he aimed for a less polished, more “bar band” affect, although the album’s number-one hit single, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” featured a variety of sound effects mixed in amidst its stadium-ready sound. For his next, and final, solo album of rock songs, 1993’s River of Dreams, Joel brought in several new musicians, replacing some of the personnel that had been with him for nearly twenty years. The closing track, “Famous Last Words,” was, indeed, that: the final statement of his songwriting career.¹⁶

Of course, Joel continued with other musical projects. Fantasies & Delusions: Music for Solo Piano, a set of his classical compositions performed by pianist Richard Joo, was released in 2001. The following year, Movin’ Out opened on Broadway, featuring the characters Brenda and Eddie (of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” from The Stranger) and a score consisting entirely of Joel’s songs. He also continued touring, often with his British contemporary, Elton John, and gave numerous masterclasses at schools, colleges, and universities. And Columbia Records released a steady stream of box sets and live albums, from 2000 Years: The Millennium Concert (2000) to My Lives (2005) to 12 Gardens Live (2006), repackaging Joel’s material in new ways.¹⁷

Billy Joel doesn’t like to talk about his legacy. It simply is not something he wants to do. We asked him, but he deflected such questions. Yet those deflections allow us, as academics, to engage his works largely free from the composer’s own vision—a freedom not often afforded to scholars whose musical studies are framed by a composer’s (sometimes) explicit wishes for how his or her work is to be understood.¹⁸ Indeed, in his foreword to this volume, Joel articulates his acceptance of the fact that scholars have and will study his works, offering readings and contextualizations that may differ from his own intentions. Therefore, we can offer our interpretations and analyses confident that, while he may or may not agree with our conclusions, Joel respects the effort put toward the serious consideration of his artistic expression.

Thus, we have an opening, and we will take it. We offer this book in an effort to productively expand the field of popular music studies while at the same time arguing for the importance of Joel’s music in it. As Joel sings in The Bridge’s “Getting Closer,” we “don’t have all the answers yet, but,” hopefully with this book, we are “getting closer, getting close.”