There aren’t many rock stars alive today who don’t consider The Beatles their prime inspiration. They revolutionized the genre, touching everyone and everything. Billy Joel is no exception. Being a piano-focused rocker, he has obvious ties to Paul McCartney. The pair once exchanged compliments, talking about which songs of theirs they wish they had written.
The Billy Joel Song Paul McCartney Wished He Had Written
Joel has gone on record, talking about how The Beatles changed his life. Because of that, it must’ve been quite a sobering moment when McCartney reached out to him to compliment his song, “Just The Way You Are”.
“That was so nice of him to say that about my song,” Joel once said. “I actually sent him an email and said, ‘Thank you for saying that.’ And he said, ‘Well, if I could have written a song, I would have liked to have written that.’ And then I said in my email, ‘You could have written it, Paul. And if I hadn’t written it, you would have written it.’”
But McCartney certainly wasn’t alone in his daydreaming about writing other people’s songs; Joel followed up his thanks to the former Beatle by picking a McCartney song to envy.
The Paul McCartney Song Billy Joel Wishes He Had Written
“Wow. All of them,” Joel once said. “There isn’t one song I wouldn’t want to have written that Paul McCartney wrote. The guy is just brilliant. He was the George Gershwin of our time. The Richard Rogers of our time; he can’t do anything wrong with the melody.”
But if Joel had to pick one track, it’d be McCartney’s melancholy “Yesterday”. “Yesterday / All my troubles seemed so far away / Now it looks as though they’re here to stay / Oh, I believe in yesterday,” McCartney sang in this tender ballad. As Joel pointed out, this song was a different kind of offering from the band. This track set McCartney apart from the rest of the 1960s rock crowd.
“I remember when that song first came out, it was different than anything else that I’d heard before,” Joel continued. “The Beatles had written happy songs [like] ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘Please Please Me’, and ‘She Loves You’.”
“This was about heartache,” he continued. “This is about sadness. This is about disappointment. And Paul sang it so well, and it was written so well. It was deeply affecting. And that’s when I realized how profound The Beatles’ music was. That’s when it really kicked off.”
Elements of “Yesterday” show up in Joel’s own songwriting, further proving how transformative The Beatles were to this piano rocker.
Photo by Dave Hogan/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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