“You get to a point where you’ve gotten good enough so that nothing is good enough”: Billy Joel describes the “curse” of being a songwriterBilly Joel may still be lighting up stages around the world, but you won’t see the Piano Man putting on his songwriting hat anytime soon, if at all.
The musician – who released Turn The Lights Back On, his first new song in 17 years this February – previously told Variety that while he “love[s] making music”, writing is a “great deal of torment, and I decided I don’t want to put myself through that anymore.”

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Speaking on Sirius XM’s brand new interview series How’s Life with John Mayer, Joel reflects on his creative journey, and shares insights into the enduring presence of the songwriter within him, even as he steps back from the craft.
Faced with the question ‘Do you think like a writer still even though you’re not writing?’, the Piano Man replies: “He never goes away.”
“The writer thing is a curse you take with you throughout life,” Joel explains, “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?’”
At the end of the day, it’s about “constantly trying to improve on what you did,” says the musician, who boasts an impressive 12 studio albums across his multi-decade career.
“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 continues. “But then you get to a point where you’ve gotten good enough so that nothing is good enough.”
To that, Mayer posits that it’s the writer’s “ear getting better than what could come out of you at any given moment.”
“You actually become kind of a sage of writing,” Mayer says, “and then the curse of that is that, as you’re writing, the ear is so good it goes ‘What’s that? That sucks.’”
Elsewhere, Joel also reveals that he never pens lyrics or notes down lyric ideas on his phone, saying, “I never write down lyrics until I’m actually songwriting. I start from the music first, always.”

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