The Happy Accident That Broke Billy Joel’s Writer’s Block and Delivered His Most Unusual Single in 1982

We all have an idea of what a Billy Joel song will sound like. It’ll have piano for sure and maybe a swingy melody. But, like any convention, that doesn’t encapsulate the entirety of his sound. He got experimental in the 1980s, trying to find a cure for writer’s block. He stumbled upon the answer haphazardly, subsequently delivering his most unusual song.

The Happy Accident That Produced One of Billy Joel’s Most Unusual Songs

In the early 1980s, Joel suffered from writer’s block; a far cry from the seemingly unstoppable trend he was on in the decade prior. Nevertheless, this immortal musician showed his humanity a bit, struggling to come up with topics to write about.

He found his way through that frustrating, if relatable experience thanks to a brief comment from a secretary in his life.

“At the time, I was saying, ‘Well, I gotta write some more stuff for the album,’” Joel once said. “I was about halfway through, and I said, ‘Well, what am I gonna do? I don’t have any ideas, it’s gone, it’s dead, I have nothing, nothing, nothing. There’s nothing.’”

“And then the woman who is my secretary came into the house at that point and said, ‘Wow, you look like you’re under a lot of pressure,’” he continued. “‘I bet you that’d be a good idea for a song.’ And I went, ‘Thank you!’”

“Pressure”

That comment produced one of the most unusual songs in Joel’s discography, “Pressure”. Taken from The Nylon Curtain, this song is about a man struggling through the weight of life. “You have to learn to pace yourself / Pressure / You’re just like everybody else / Pressure,” he sings in this autobiographical song.

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While the lyrical content is simple, the musicality is a storm of sounds. Joel employed a whole new level of music theory in this confusing track, making it almost too robust for mainstream play.

There are tempo changes and key changes, soundbites and samples. It’s one of Joel’s most un-Joel tracks.

“On ‘Pressure’, the noise that sounds like the horn of a French taxicab,” Joel once said. “That strange, breathless staccato beep is actually a tape of me singing every note in my repertoire.”

He added of his writing process, “While the master tape was running, I impulsively hit all the buttons on the tape machine to punch out everything but the section with the yelling. [Producer] Phil [Ramone] was dumbstruck. ‘God! What did you do? You erased part of the song!’ Phil was right: for that one segment everything stops dead but my voice, but it was just what the track needed.”

This isn’t “Piano Man”, that’s for sure. This is Joel throwing his style to the wind in favor of a breakthrough moment. Revisit “Pressure” above.

(Photo by Bobby Bank/Getty Images)