Billy Joel went for the gusto on his 1982 album The Nylon Curtain. In addition to digging deeper than ever when it came to his songwriting, he and producer Phil Ramone also utilized studio technology more than ever before to realize his artistic intent.
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Many of the songs have become staples of Joel’s catalog. But you might not know everything that went into making them, such as these five tidbits.
Writer’s Block Led to a Hit
“Pressure” introduced the album to the world as the lead single. Joel utilized synthesizer textures that recalled the scary scores that Bernard Hermann devised for Alfred Hitchcock movies. In terms of the lyrics, Joel mentions many of the things that can build up in a person’s life and expand into a pressurized situation. But his actual inspiration for the song came from his own conundrum as a recording artist. He was struggling to come up with enough songs for the album. His assistant, visiting him one day, sensed the pressure he was under. After mentioning it to him, Joel was off and running with the song.
The Bible Changed One Famous Track
On “Allentown” from The Nylon Curtain, Joel tackles the decline of the steel industry and its effect on the towns that relied so heavily on those businesses. As usual, Joel came up with the topic for the song only after he had the basic structure of the music. He initially was singing about Levittown, a burg in New York near where he grew up, because it fit the meter. He then shifted the song’s focus to Pennsylvania once he knew the actual issue he wanted to address. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania fit the subject matter. But Joel worried that listeners would draw associations to the biblical Bethlehem. Only then did he finally settle on “Allentown”.
Billy Does Requests
Joel went into The Nylon Curtain with a vague idea that he was going to be looking outward more than ever before. At the start of the 80s, many people of his generation were reckoning with events in America from the recent past. The Vietnam War loomed as large as anything from that perspective. But Joel only moved ahead with writing “Goodnight Saigon” because veterans he knew had bugged him to do so. He worried that he couldn’t bring authenticity to the material because he hadn’t served in the war himself. But he decided to do it by transforming the stories he was told by these veterans about their service into the song’s lyrics.
Think of “Laura”
Joel has never shied away from expressing negative emotions in his songs or albums, and The Nylon Curtain is no different.. It’s one of the aspects of his work that’s so refreshingly authentic and human. Just like all his listeners get teed off about stuff, so does Joel, so why not write about it? “Laura” stands out as one of his bitterest lyrical takedowns. After the song was released, Joel didn’t single out the identity of the person who inspired the main character. Only years down the road did Joel explain that “Laura” was a song that he used to vent some frustrations about the behavior of his mother, with whom he had a complicated, tumultuous relationship.
A Strange Trip in More Ways Than One
It’s well-documented that Joel has had his ups and downs with alcohol over the years. Unlike so many of his peers, however, he has largely steered clear of recreational drugs. That said, he turned one of the few times that he partook in those substances into the song “Scandinavian Skies” from The Nylon Curtain. He was referencing the one time that he took heroin, which came during a visit to the Netherlands. Joel was still feeling the impact of the drug when he and his band flew to Sweden, which is how the title of the song came to be. Joel fills “Scandinavian Skies” with a multitude of freaky, psychedelic musical effects to evoke the out-of-body experience he had undergone.
Photo by Jim Houghton/Sony Music Archives/HBO
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