“You get to a point where you’ve gotten good enough so that nothing is good enough”: Billy Joel explains to John Mayer why he gave up on songwriting

Although he continues to tour, songwriting is no longer Billy Joel’s thing. Yes, there was a new single, Turn The Lights Back On, earlier this year - a song that was co-written with Freddy Wexler, Arthur Bacon and Wayne Hector - but, as Joel said around the time of its release, that was very much a one-off.

"There's this big black beast with 88 teeth that wants to bite my fingers off while I'm writing,” the Piano Man told Variety. “I drive myself nuts. It's just not as good as I want it to be. It's a great deal of torment, and I decided I don't want to put myself through that anymore. I used to have drinking problems and all kinds of self-hate when I was writing, because I set the bar so high. It's not something I miss. I love making music."

John Mayer, though, has a theory. In a new interview, the first in his How’s Life series on SiriusXM, Mayer put it to Joel that, even though he’s not writing songs anymore, ‘Billy the writer’ still exists somewhere, and he wanted to know what’s happened to him.

“He never goes away,” admits Joel. “The writer thing is a curse you take with you throughout life, and when I listen to material or listen to other people’s songs the writer is always at work - ‘Well, I would have done it this way’ or ‘Why did it go to that chord?’”

Billy Joel: Being a Songwriter is a "Curse" | How's Life with John Mayer - YouTube

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Joel went on to open up on the difficulty of being a songwriter who has a long career, explaining that you’re “constantly trying to improve on what you did”.

“When you’re writing early on, you’re not editing as much as you do later on, and the more you write the better you get,” he says. “But then you get to a point where you’ve gotten good enough so that nothing is good enough.”

Mayer’s take on this is that it’s the writer’s ‘ear’ “getting better than what could come out of you at any given moment.”

“You become a kind of sage of writing,” he adds, “and then the curse of that is that, as you’re writing, the ear is so good it goes ‘What’s that? That sucks.’”

Or, to put it another way, the better you get at songwriting, the more disheartening it becomes, until you reach the point where, like Joel, you don’t want to do it anymore.

Which all sounds pretty bleak, but don’t let it put you off. Billy Joel managed to write and record 12 studio albums before he put down his pen, so most of us probably still have plenty of songs in our locker.