The classic Billy Joel song he called “a terrible piece of music”

A songwriting hero, Billy Joel has a string of classics to his name, including ‘Piano Man’, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ and ‘Moving Out’. A master wordsmith and musician, the New Yorker has captured the imagination of the masses with his efforts and, in reflection of this, is the fourth-best-selling solo artist in the United States.

Despite being so revered, Billy Joel remains one of the most self-aware hitmakers out there. “I’ve written some real stinkers I wish I could take back,” he told The Los Angeles Times in March 2023, naming ‘When in Rome’ from 1989’s Storm Front and ‘C’etait toi (You Were the One)’ from 1980’s Glass Houses as two songs that he would delete from history if he could. He later estimated that “at least 25 per cent” of his oeuvre is worth forgetting about. 

Billy Joel hasn’t saved this criticism for his lesser-known tracks either. His 1989 number one single, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, is one he’s torn into at various points. A song noted for its dash across history, Joel’s fast-paced lyrics reference 188 significant political, cultural, scientific and sporting events between his birth year, 1948, and the year the track arrived. 

Joel developed the idea for ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ when he had just turned 40. At the time, he was in a recording studio and encountered a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon, who remarked, “It’s a terrible time to be 21!”. The much maturer Joel responded, “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful”.

Joel’s younger counterpart then said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the ’50s and everybody knows that nothing happened in the ’50s”. The shocked songwriter replied, “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?”. This interaction was enough to spark the basic idea of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’.

Speaking at Oxford University in 1994, Joel was asked if he specifically intended to chronicle the story of the Cold War with the song. He explained that chance actually had much to do with it: “It was just my luck that the Soviet Union decided to close down shop [soon after putting out the song]”. He added that the tale “had a symmetry to it” as “it was 40 years” he had lived through.

Was he considering doing a follow-up about the momentous couple of years that followed the events of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’? Billy Joel expressed: “No, I wrote one song already, and I don’t think it was really that good to begin with, melodically”.

This problem with the song’s harmony was something that Billy Joel had already made clear in 1993 when discussing it with documentary maker David Horn. There, he asserted that the melody on its own is “a terrible” piece of music. “A song like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, it’s really not much of a song, if you go like this,” he said before demonstrating his point on the piano, playing the melody with a comical dance. He adds, “It’s a terrible piece of music.”

“But, it started as a whole different song. The original song I had was this country idea that I had,” he continues before playing the initial track and revealing how it became the 1989 hit. Joel concludes, “But when you take the melody by itself, terrible, it’s like a dentist drill.”

Watch the clip below.