Billy Joel recently returned from a long recording hiatus with the stirring ballad “Turn the Lights Back On.” The man certainly possesses the touch for the slow ones, as he has demonstrated throughout the entirety of his career. “Honesty,” a heart-wrencher released in 1978, stands as one of his finest.
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What does the song mean? Why did Joel struggle a bit with the lyrics? And what was with that needle drop of the song in Succession? All the answers can be found if we go back to the late ’70s, a time when Billy Joel could do no wrong.
“Street” Legal
Joel’s career in no way followed a steady upward trajectory. After an opening album botched by a production mishap, his second album delivered a signature song in “Piano Man” and put him right near the top of the extremely competitive singer/songwriter genre. But success only came in fits and starts the next few years.
On the 1977 album The Stranger, Joel found a producer in Phil Ramone who knew how to get the most out of his songs. And the songs he delivered were crowd-pleasers—smart, ambitious tracks to which a wide swath of people could relate. Pop superstardom was his, but he needed to know how to handle it and deliver a follow-up that capitalized on his success.
52nd Street, released in 1978, achieved that feat and then some. The changes were subtle, such as some jazzy textures on the album tracks, and singles like “My Life” and “Big Shot” that leaned hard into Joel’s sassier tendencies. Like all Joel albums, he went to the ballad well a few times on the record, including with a lovely piano piece that transformed from a semi-classical opening into a swaying, soulful rhythm.
The problem was that he didn’t have any words. He knew that the main title refrain featured three syllables, which meant that he needed a word that fit that description. Drummer Liberty DeVitto came up with “Sodomy.” Needless to say, as Joel recalled in an interview earlier this year with Howard Stern, that didn’t have much commercial potential. But it was a launching point.
“I need something to make me do it fast, or make me do it at all,” he told Stern. “I knew it couldn’t be ‘Sodomy.’ I liked the melody, the band liked the melody. The studio time was booked. What are we going to call this thing? So I said, ‘You know what fits? ‘Honesty.’ And then I wrote the lyrics, right there and then.”
Those lyrics resonated with a famous fictional character from one of television’s most acclaimed dramas ever. In a Season 3 episode of HBO’s Succession, Kendall Roy, played by Jeremy Strong, is planning his 40th birthday party. One of his ideas is to serenade the crowd with a rendition of “Honesty,” and Strong is seen rehearsing the song early in the episode. Unfortunately, things go awry, and he changes his mind, so we are denied a full rendition. But it’s still a testament to the song’s straightforward power that the show’s producers and writers utilized it in that manner.
The Meaning of “Honesty”
With “Honesty,” Joel contends that most relationships willingly offer up a lot of useful qualities, such as tenderness, sympathy, passion, friendship, and comfort. But truth eludes us. You might just as well be blind, he sings as a warning to those in search of it. The rub is that “Honesty” is the one thing that the narrator wants the most.
But I don’t want some pretty face / To tell me pretty lies, Joel complains. All I want is someone to believe. The song rises to a peak in the final verse, when the narrator speaks with touching vulnerability to his significant other: ‘Cause you’re the one that I depend upon. The second syllable of upon then morphs into the finest syllable of honesty, as Joel belts out the final refrain with desperate gusto.
“Honesty” only proved a minor hit at the time of its release, although it did receive a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year. More importantly, it has stood the test of time. That’s because its theme of truthfulness over all else still makes a ton of sense. Just ask Kendall Roy.
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