I looked back down at the piano and just said ‘Thank you.’” (It was a timely meeting for Joel who’d just divorced his previous wife and former manager Elizabeth for whom he’d composed ‘Just The Way You Are’ as a birthday gift. Recalling meeting MacPherson, Brinkley and Houston (then working as a model and unknown as a singer) in the Caribbean hotel Joel says he was playing piano in the hotel bar one evening when, “I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano.
While ‘Uptown Girl’ is usually assumed to be about Joel’s soon-to-be wife, supermodel Christie Brinkley (who also appeared in the video), the song was actually begun sometime earlier when Joel was dating Brinkley’s supermodel colleague Elle MacPherson (and then entitled ‘Uptown Girls’ after he’d met MacPherson, Brinkley and Whitney Houston at a Caribbean holiday resort), however by the time he got around to polishing up the lyrics, he says the song was focussed entirely on Brinkley. Hubert Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’, not strictly classical I know, but not far from it either! For the wonderfully moving ‘Leningrad’ (1989 – written after he met a clown at a concert there in August 1987) he seems to have borrowed his intro from Brahms’ ‘Waldesnacht’ and finally, ‘And So It Goes’ (1990, actually written for An Innocent Man in 1982 but not fitting the concept and in fact a song Joel had enormous difficulty in completing and not lyrically finished until 1990) is decidedly reminiscent of C. Taken from his album An Innocent Man which was an homage to the music of his youth, ‘Uptown Girl’ was in the style of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – Valli himself says he loved the song but wishes Joel had given it to them since they needed a hit at the time! Other tracks including ‘This Night’ and ‘The Longest Time’ harked back to the 1950s doo-wop period while there were also songs that reflected the late 1950s rock’n’roll era and the ‘Motown’ and ‘Atlantic’ soul sounds of the 1960s.īilly Joel has often borrowed melodies from his obviously large classical collection and many may not have noticed that ‘Uptown Girl’ has a chorus suspiciously similar to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ while ‘This Night’ (from the same album) comes from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.8, the ‘Pathetique’. This was probably Joel’s biggest hit on a worldwide basis (Number 1 in Australia, his only UK Number 1 and Number 3 in America) and still remains a party floor filler and oldies radio favourite over 30 years on.
Quote from The Girl In The Song, Michael Heatley & Frank Hopkinson (Portico Books, 2010) Recorded at Chelsea Sound & A&R Recording, New York City “I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano.”
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