Billy Joel on the “only other co-writer I was able to work with”
One of the most enduring conversations in the music industry is the meaning of art. Does something always have to have a meaning? Is it possible for something to have been made without any real substance? Although it probably depends on what you define as art, one songwriter, Billy Joel, knows what it feels like to tackle the complexities of meaningless art head-on.
Joel isn’t somebody we would consider a connoisseur of meaningless music, not by a long shot. In fact, his entire career is built on curating the exact opposite, whether it’s in the political beats of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ or the strangely controversial themes running throughout ‘Only the Good Die Young’. Joel is also immensely personal in his writing, often shunning collaborators in favour of a more quintessentially solo approach.
While it’s unclear why Joel rarely enlists other musicians in his work, there was one instance in which he veered off course, looking for external help to push him through an immovable amount of writer’s block. To make matters worse, Joel was struggling with the subject matter of a particular song, knowing only the broader sense of the composition and not much else about what he wanted to say.
As the song suggests, Joel wanted to write ‘Code of Silence’ about the concept of silence, but something struck him as fundamentally contradictory, enough to stop him in his tracks and stagnate any progress. “I’m writing about silence and I have to talk,” Joel told Sirius XM in 2016. “There’s a conflict there already. A code of silence, I’m not supposed to talk about it, so why the hell am I?”
At the time, Cyndi Lauper was working on True Colors in the same studio Joel was working on material for The Bridge, the album that featured ‘Code of Silence’. Noticing the singer struggling with his work, she offered to step in an support him with some improvisation, which unsuspectingly flourished into a wider musical collaboration.
As someone who usually cocoons themselves away while they work, Joel was pleasantly surprised by Lauper’s contributions, and even openly praised her while discussing the track in a later interview with Howard Stern. Not only that, but he called her “the only other co-writer to be able to work with because she did all the work.”
While he did also credit Ludwig van Beethoven due to sampling a piece of his music, Lauper remains the only other musician he felt comfortable letting into his carefully curated world. As a general rule, Joel only works with others if he is entirely certain it will be beneficial and not detrimental to his career. Perhaps the only reason it worked so well with Lauper is that it was unexpected, which is usually the perfect recipe for success.