The music of Bruce Springsteen has never been about trying to copy anyone.
As much as people liked to take one look at him back in the day and claim that he was another Bob Dylan ripoff, there was something about the way he sang about everyday life that resonated with every single blue-collar worker who heard his music. He was singing for the everyman, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t people who could outdo him at his own game from time to time.
Because without knowing it, ‘The Boss’ had accidentally given birth to heartland rock on albums like Born to Run. The genre didn’t have a name yet, but when listening to a lot of the artists that came after him, people like John Mellencamp probably wouldn’t have had the same kind of impact that they did if Springsteen had burst the door open back in the day. But that blue-collar way of looking at everything looks a lot different depending on where you’re from.
After all, the heartland reaches a lot of different places other than the Midwest. Springsteen was the representative of New Jersey, but Tom Petty was representing what everyday was like in California, while Bob Seger was focusing on what was happening in cities like Detroit. So if that’s what those cities sounded like, how the hell was anyone supposed to make that kind of music about ‘The Big Apple’.
New York has never run short of artists who are willing to rep the city, but it’s not like all of them are born and raised there, either. Sinatra has one of the greatest odes to New York in the city’s history, but even though he grew up in New Jersey, when you had a kid from Long Island singing about his everyday life, fans were willing to give him a shot, even if he substituted the guitar for a piano.
Although Billy Joel was far from the greatest-selling recording artist when he first began, there was something universal about his songs that’s impossible to put your finger on. A lot of his songs do have their lineage in classical music, but even when looking at everything else on the charts that has come out before and since Joel, there’s no one else in the world that has managed to create the same vibe that he has on tracks like ‘Vienna’ and ‘New York State of Mind’.
While there’s a lot of mutual respect between Springsteen and Joel, ‘The Boss’ wasn’t afraid to say that ‘The Piano Man’ usually had him beat when it came to picking the right melodies, saying, “I’m obviously more identified with New Jersey, so I came more out of a folk rock-and-roll background. Billy is still more identified with New York, he had all that Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, which is why his melodies are better than mine.”
That might seem a little far-fetched, but it’s not like Springsteen was talking out of his ass here. There are a lot of elements to Joel’s tunes that are handed down from the same Tin Pan Alley style of songwriting, and without even watching a single show, the raw recording of a song like ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ feels like it was made to have a huge Broadway production behind it.
It doesn’t make sense trying to split hairs and say who is absolutely better, but a lot of it comes from the way that both of them write. ‘Born to Run’ sounds nothing like ‘Big Shot’, but when listening to both tunes, you could hardly imagine another voice singing them other than their respective writers.
