More Than I Hoped For

Billy Joel “The Longest Time”

Billy Joel’s music was so omnipresent through my childhood that it took me a very long time to understand that his primary mode as a songwriter was pastiche. It’s pretty obvious! But you know, it’s easy to lose context when something is so foundational for you. With this in mind, it occurs to me that the contemporary artist with the most in common with Joel is actually Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. Like Joel, Murdoch is skilled in adapting his natural gift for classic melody to a variety of pop modes from the past, but keeping it all within an immediately apparent personal aesthetic. But whereas Billy Joel’s music is rooted in bitterness and cynicism, Murdoch consistently writes from an empathetic and optimistic point of view.

“The Longest Time” is from An Innocent Man, the Billy Joel album most overtly based in pastiche. Each song on the record was written to evoke a different major influence from Joel’s youth, and this song in particular was a tribute to doo-wop. Joel is very well suited to the style, and the song is built around one of his loveliest and most elegant set of melodies. The most interesting thing about “The Longest Time” is that it’s written in the style of songs that were intended to express very sweet and naive sentiments about romance for an audience of teenagers, but he’s approaching that subject matter from the perspective of a man in his mid-30s. The guy in this song has fallen in love, but is surprised that this has happened – he’s been burned before, he’s had his defenses up for a while. But somehow he’s met someone who truly inspires him and shakes him out of a cynical, self-defeating rut. Joel’s lyrics are sincerely romantic, but cautious in its optimism. He’s absolutely smitten, and just trying extremely hard not to screw up a good thing.

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Billy Joel “Captain Jack”

The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are written in the second person, a technique that is almost always going to result in a creepy, uncomfortable feeling for the listener. You can hear this two ways: Billy Joel is either putting you in the experience of a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie, or he’s putting you in the mind of someone observing a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie and harshly judging them from a distance. Either way, the lyrics hijack your own perspective, so the seedy details and pathetic behavior come off a little more unsettling than they would if they were sung in either the first or third person. There’s an itchy feeling to the song – “ugh, get me out of here, this is gross” alternating with “ugh, get this voice out of my head.”

“Captain Jack” is a fairly early Billy Joel composition that sets the tone for a lot of the songs he would write as he progressed through his career. Musically, he’s merging the aesthetics of ’60s rock with the drama and grandeur of musical theater, and is basically on the same page as his contemporaries Andrew Lloyd Webber and Pete Townshend, and several years ahead of Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf. Lyrically, he’s 23 years old and already revealing himself to be a major curmudgeon with a defensive contempt for “cool” guys of every kind. The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are hectoring and pitiless, and seem to be written deliberately to humiliate his subjects and reveal them as pretentious frauds who are merely dabbling with a down-and-out lifestyle. In this song, and in many Joel hits, the implication is that he’s watching some guy and seething: “Oh, you think you’re better than me? YOU think you’re better than ME? Well, fuck you, buddy!”

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