Why Billy Quit

I like Billy Joel. He’s not the most ambitious artist or brilliant lyricist. He’s not cool. Nonetheless, he’s a fine composer and a guy I grew up with, listening to Glass Houses, An Innocent Man, and Storm Front in particular. He’s also a guy with an expansive enough catalog that pretty much everyone knows some of his music. At twelve albums deep and at least couple radio hits per LP, he achieved a level of ubiquity.

Then I came upon an interview with him, published 2018, that included several revelations. Yes, there was the welcome understanding of his political perspective (and that he’s more political than people tend to give him credit for based on his music) and some fun insights into his creative process. I was more surprised, though, to realize that he hadn’t released a studio album since 1993. I was vaguely conscious it had been a while, but also assumed that like so many artists he had continued producing after I’d stopped consuming, and carried on his career, if a bit less in the spotlight.

The next surprise was the rationale. I’m paraphrasing significantly, but the gist was that he was worried about diluting his catalog—following up twelve albums he was proud of with clunkers that weren’t as musically accomplished or commercially successful, and that thus diminished his legacy.

The idea resonated with me, thinking of the many writers I know who are more careful about their publications than I am. I have, for much of the last six or so years, sent out a lot of work. I’d read about aspiring writers who aimed for one hundred rejections in a year in the interest of getting their work out there, growing comfortable with rejection, and earning their spots with magazines because acceptances often only come with a disproportionate number of rejections to counterbalance them. And I’d think to myself, a hundred? I’ve gotten three or four times that many in a year.

I've written prolifically enough to support multiple blogs, a fledgling freelance career, and, at times, that volume of literary publishing. And yet I know plenty of writers who don’t approach those numbers and who don’t want to.

There are very legitimate questions of quantity versus quality. I’ve tended to maintain that my best work holds up beside the best work my informal cohort of writers. I just also happen to have a lot of other work that, while I’m proud of, I’ll also readily admit isn’t as great, and that I’ve tiered off for themed submissions and for less established journals to put the work out into the world. And I think of those peers who say I’d better served, instead, to focus my efforts on reworking the best stuff over and over and earning one of those elusive tip-top tier publication credits with The New Yorker or The Paris Review.

Billy Joel’s comments got me thinking about this conversation, and the degree to which it’s true that he’s better remembered for twelve albums he’s proud of than if he had six more that no one really liked, and if I’d be better served to only publish one story a year, but to only settle for placing work the most selective, hitherto aspirtational venues.

While I don’t think there are objective right or wrong answers at hand for a question like this, on further reflection I did recognize a difference in how Joel and I look at art, production, and even his specific catalog. Especially nowadays, I don’t listen to any Billy Joel album from end-to-end. I cherry pick one of the maybe five tracks I really like from a given album and listen to it, or add it to a playlist. Thus, I don’t imagine adding new albums to his body of work would dilute his library—it would probably just add another two or three songs to the list of ones I like.

So it is with the body of my own work that’s ever in progress. I write enough and am an unestablished enough literary voice that I don’t expect for anyone except my most dedicated and voraciously-reading-inclined friends and family to read everything I publish. I hope to produce a large enough body of work for them and for the more casual readers to cherry pick selected pieces that really speak to them—that they remember, reread, or bring up in conversation.

Joel knocks Elton John for producing so—implicitly questioning why he bothers releasing his non-Hall-of-Fame-caliber stuff. And this is where I subscribe to the “you’ll never hit homeruns if you don’t take a swing everytime you're at bat” method, or to a put a finer point on it, the “the more swings you take, the more home runs you might hit” school of thought.

Billy Joel can rest on his laurels. I’ll still be out here swinging for the fences.