(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 1 January 2026 16:00, UK
Particularly in the early years, Billy Joel had to put his money where his mouth was many times, proving he was the right musician to take a gamble on.
$450,000 was spent developing him as an artist, only for his 1971 debut album, Cold Spring Harbor, to be a complete commercial disappointment. Indeed, it would take another six years and three records before The Stranger brought him his major breakthrough in 1977, finally recouping some of the thousands of dollars which had so far been fizzled away.
But in many ways, none of this would have happened if it weren’t for one man entering into the orbit and showing that there was a different way things could be done. This was a man who Joel subsequently said he owed his career to, simply for having the confidence to make music of his own style. That hero was, of course, James Taylor.
“James really changed the game,” Joel recalled of those heady days of the ‘70s during a 2016 interview. “All of a sudden, singer-songwriters were in demand as recording artists, and I got signed to Columbia during that era. James Taylor kind of kicked the door down, and I owe him a debt for that because I might not have got signed or even heard if it hadn’t been for James’s success.”
From the second that Taylor’s sophomore Sweet Baby James first hit the airwaves in 1970, the world knew it was hailing a folk-rock masterpiece of epic proportions. No longer were things singularly political, or romantic, or mournful, but a whole combination of these things that champion the strength of the human heart.
For a musical maestro like Joel, who revelled in this form of songwriting as much as the intricacies of his sonics, this was bound to have been like a godly call from on high at the promise of how music was opening up and changing for the better. He even met Taylor around that time in a nightclub and got the opportunity to jam, bringing together the oeuvres of two men set to change the songwriting world.
It seemed that the careers of both Joel and Taylor both mirrored and diverged from each other the more time went on, with the former catapulting to his most seismic heights over the course of the 1980s, while the latter had to somewhat start from scratch again. But it was a shared musical tenacity, as well as an inherent belief in the stories they were trying to tell, that kept them on the straight and narrow.
These days, both of them have truly paid their dues and got their money’s worth in terms of acclaim and success, but it never takes away from the roots of where they came from. They are both writers and true lyricists at heart, and nothing about that will ever change. It just took Taylor laying down the law of the land first.
Joel knows that not only does he owe his career to a lot of people, including Taylor, but that a lot more people owe their careers to him in return. That’s both the circle of life and the circle of music – the thing that will never stop pushing out the next best thing, even when you don’t know what that is.
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