If I Only Had The Words To Tell You
Song: If I I Only Had The Words (To Tell You)
Album: Piano Man (1973)
One of the stated goals of A Year of Billy Joel is to try and determine what exactly it is I haven’t liked about Billy Joel and his music. There are a number of reasons but today I’d like to discuss one of them: Music videos.
I was born in the mid 70’s and spent a lot of time in the 80’s time watching MTV. While I had heard many Billy Joel songs prior to seeing him on MTV, I think his music videos played a role in developing my opinion about Billy Joel. By the mid 80’s Billy Joel had been putting out hit records for a decade so when he made videos to support The Nylon Curtain and An Innocent Man it made perfect sense for them to be played on MTV.
Now it’s not that these videos were bad, not at all. Billy Joel’s videos were very good but they were anachronistic. While some artists videos were racing towards the future, the images in Billy Joel’s videos were throwbacks to an earlier era (especially Tell Her About It and Uptown Girl). As a young viewer I found this old fashioned and not nearly as cool as other artists’ videos. Today I realize that many of the videos I enjoyed in 1984 were by artists less accomplished than Billy Joel but it impacted my opinion anyway. I was a kid and by rule I did dumb things.
What I’m realizing now that I’m listening to the entire Billy Joel catalog is that it wasn’t just the videos; Billy Joel has spent his entire career looking back to earlier eras and finding inspiration. I just happened to watch them on TV instead of hearing them on record. One of the pleasant surprises of listening to the Piano Man album has been hearing these influences play themselves out musically instead of on the screen. For example, there is old fashioned Brill Building style song craft on things like “If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You)” all the way down to the underlying cynicism of the best Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry compositions. At first listen the song strikes you as sweet and sentimental but it get’s much darker with repeated listens; not unlike another Brill Building classic; Carol King and Gerry Goffin’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow.” Not bad company to be in but this is another solid Billy Joel song. Had Billy Joel had been writing songs 15 years earlier this song could have been a hit for someone.*
If you’re keeping score at home this is three songs in a row that I’ve liked. Is it possible that I’ve just heard (and saw) Billy Joel’s music in the wrong order? Time will tell, but this is pretty good stuff I’m listening to right now.
*The Brill Building Billy Joel connection is actually more than just a case of Billy emulating music he admired. Legend states that a teenaged Billy Joel actually played piano on the Shadow Morton written Shangri-La’s hit “Remember (Walking In the Sand).” Speaking of the Shangri-La’s, lead singer Mary Weiss put out a fantastic record a few years ago, backed by the Reigning Sound, it sounds like this.
