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Just as with vocals, Joel uses nonmusical sounds and instruments in ways that clearly evoke the Beatles. Examples include the opening steam whistle of The Nylon Curtain’s “Allentown” and the audience sounds of “Sgt. Pepper,” the lead guitar on “Laura” and both “Sgt. Pepper” and “Fixing a Hole,” and the use of strings on “Scandinavian Skies” and “She’s Leaving Home.” Most biographies of Joel use “Scandinavian Skies,” whose lyrics (at least on the surface) detail an ill-fated European tour, to illustrate how the Beatles influenced Joel’s style, with comparisons to “A Day in the Life” and “I Am the Walrus.”²⁷ Bielen likens the string parts to those used by Martin, Joel’s vocal delivery to Lennon, and the percussion to Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.²⁸ Schruers mentions how, at the time Joel began recording The Nylon Curtain, he “came to the realization that the Beatles had begun using the studio as an instrument.”²⁹

Indeed, many of the songs on Revolver and Sgt. Pepper employed new or distinctive studio techniques, such as using prerecorded sounds to help set the scene, as heard in the opening of “Sgt. Pepper.” In “Goodnight Saigon,” Joel uses the sounds of crickets and helicopters conjure the terror of war in the jungle. In “Scandinavian Skies,” it is the sounds of jet aircraft and an airport announcement, muffled to the point of unintelligibility as if to emphasize the song’s abstruse nature. Additionally, Martin and the Beatles played recorded sounds backwards on Revolver’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” and in Sgt. Pepper’s run-out groove, just as Joel does with the strings on “Scandinavian Skies.”

Those strings, in fact, contribute to the song’s cultivation of a psychedelic atmosphere as their melody meanders angularly and chromatically against a treble-register pedal provided by the piano’s tolling Cs, not unlike the piano octaves on Sgt. Pepper’s “Getting Better.” The effect on “Scandinavian Skies” can also be compared with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” where the vocal melody sticks to C-sharp—repeatedly returning to that pitch on nearly every beat—while McCartney’s Lowery organ meanders in a series of arpeggios.

Just as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has long been associated with drug use, Joel confirms that “Scandinavian Skies” is, too. It “was a drug trip,” he says, a metaphor congruent with the song’s theme of grueling travel. “[It] scared the crap out of me. . . . It was all very surrealistic and macabre and bizarre.” Without skipping a beat, he immediately links that thought with “A Day in the Life,” singing “I’d love to turn you on,” complete with Lennon’s eerie, extended trill that, in his view, communicates a sense of chilly morbidity. The angular string line and marshal snare drum, introduced at the beginning of “Scandinavian Skies” and heard throughout the track, aim for the same effect. In Joel’s words: “there’s something weird—it’s not bad yet—but there’s something a little weird going on. . . . And the drums are marching . . . You’re inevitably going into the drum cesspool.”³⁰

Joel is not simply recycling the Beatles’ ideas. Rather, he is referencing those ideas in a way that might be described as “intertextual” or, as musicologist Ingrid Monson writes, “intermusical” in its capacity to both “refer to the past and offer social commentary.”³¹ Perhaps that reference to the past points to the optimism and desire for change embodied by certain social movements of the 1960s, for which the Beatles, and Sgt. Pepper in particular, provided a soundtrack. At the same time, the social commentary Joel offers on The Nylon Curtain may be that, by the early 1980s, as the young men and women who went to Woodstock were a long thirteen years older, perhaps the dreams of their once-youthful selves had not yet come true—and it appeared less and less likely they ever would. For Joel, Lennon’s death in 1980 meant the end of an era, the end of his dream of more Beatles music. It is an ending, like that of “Where’s the Orchestra?,” revealing that sometimes “life isn’t a Broadway musical; it’s a Greek tragedy.”³²