Despite being the biggest band in music history with a huge legacy and spanning discography, there’s also something about The Beatles that feels oddly personal. Each person has their own unique experience with them; their favourite songs, their good memories, their top albums – including Billy Joel.
Maybe it’s the sheer scale of the band that allows it to happen. With 12 studio albums, including a few lengthy double LPs, and now countless compilations and anthology boxsets, even sharing studio drafts and unreleased demos, there is so much material to dive into. There’s also a story to buy into, too, as the band evolved with such speed and morphed so fascinatingly from era to era.
It means that any given person can find their space within it. For fans of more psychedelic stuff, the mid-1960s Beatles come their own. For fans of ballads, there are plenty of them, along with the love stories behind them, to get intrigued by. There are slow songs, fast songs, rock songs, folk songs. There are funny songs and deeply sincere songs. There are so many songs that you could mention the track’s titles to any given person on the street, and they might not have ever heard them, yet still know their importance. Even decades on, there are still things for people to discover about the band.
That doesn’t even begin to cover the personal element of music and the way that sound embeds itself into our memories. So many artists have shared personal stories about the way that The Beatles soundtracked their childhood or how certain songs came to represent their own desire to make music, or even directly inspired their own work.
That was the case for Billy Joel, as his own favourite Beatles’ work opened up the doors for his own material. “I had always admired the B-side of Abbey Road,” Joel told USA Today, revealing the Abbey Road Medley to be his favourite moment in the band’s discography. It’s also a moment that influenced his own work as he heard Paul McCartney and the band telling stories of different characters and wanted to write his own.
“What happened was The Beatles didn’t have completely finished songs or wholly fleshed-out ideas, and George said, ‘What have you got?’ John said, ‘Well, I got this,’ and Paul said, ‘I got that.’ They all sat around and went, ‘Hmm, we can put this together and that’ll fit in there.’ And that’s pretty much what I did,” he said, and the result in his own work was ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’.
But just as everyone has their favourite Beatles moments, they have their least favourite too. “I’m not a big fan of The White Album, but some people love it,” he said, perfectly proving the point that each person finds their own place within the band’s world. For Joel, that place isn’t 1968, as he said, “I hear it as a collection of half-assed songs they didn’t finish writing because they were too stoned, or they didn’t care anymore.”
