Billy Joel regrets letting down “clever lyrics” with “horrible” music | CPT PPP Coverage

However, it is the inherent contemporary cheesiness of this music that he feels hamstrings the clever thesis of the track. Speaking about the much-maligned masterpiece on We Didn’t Start the Fire: The History Podcast, Joel said of his 1989 single: “The only thing I’ve heard about that song from people is, ‘I hate song!’ Some people hate that song. It’s one of the most hated things I ever wrote! And I don’t get the hate.” However, Joel is ambivalent towards it, musing that it is clever, catchy, and affecting, he just wishes it cooler—many have had similar thoughts in a more generalised sense. 

“I mean, I hate the music, because it’s not good,” Joel rather harshly admitted. “But I think the lyrics are fairly clever, I think I did a pretty good job with the words, but some people just hate that thing.” He explained: “I wrote the words first, which is why the music is so horrible in that song. I usually write the music first and then I write the lyrics, but in that song, the melody…it’s like a mosquito buzzing around your head! It’s more annoying than musical.”

However, you could argue that the mosquito motif is almost fitting for a song about how the unfurling hardships of history can’t be swatted away—you could now add a verse akin to ‘Taylor Swift, terrorists, mortgage rates and federalists, culture wars, lockdown bores, and Donald Trump’s in prison’. The frantic music adds a sense of vitalised immediacy to the track that is also appropriate for how the song came to be. 

The song was spawned out of a conversation that Joel had with John Lennon’s son Sean in the studio. Sean was with a friend who told Joel that it was a “terrible time” to be a young person. Joel was on the eve of his 40th birthday, and he told the despairing youngsters that things weren’t much brighter when he was 21 either. Ultimately, he decided to elucidate this point by depicting the entirety of his 40-year history in an ecstatic textbook of song—a song that is perhaps aptly touched with regret; history is full of good ideas gone awry, perfectly honest mistakes, and flashes of genius.