Is it cool to like Billy Joel yet? The singer-songwriter has certainly been around long enough (38 years). He's had more than enough hit singles (53). And, crucially, he's been misunderstood in his time - despite a Grammy-studded recording career, the rock press always showed him a certain degree of critical disdain.
Take this year's 30th anniversary re-release of 1977's multi-platinum The Stranger. A Rolling Stone reviewer heaped plaudits and stars upon the album - even as he described the 'glistening dollops of Broadway schmaltz'.
'I don't really know why there's this revisionist view of me now,' Joel says. 'I think you just hang around long enough, all of a sudden you become an icon.'
You get the feeling Joel is a little cynical about his mantle of pop icon. Of course, he has never been entirely happy with tags such as balladeer, which critics were eager to slap on after the runaway success of piano-led songs like Just the Way You Are. In fact, he did have much more hard-edged material, most notably 1980's Glass Houses, said to be a reaction to the perception of him as 'soft-rock'.
'I think there was a suspicion among music critics that I was just a singles pop artist, that I wasn't an authentic rock and roller. I wrote entire albums of material; I thought of myself as an album artist,' says Joel. 'But take a song out of context of its album, like Uptown Girl, it almost sounds like something that was done by Tony Orlando. You know? Uptown Girl out of the context of the album sounds like a musical joke, which in a way, it kind of is.'
He adds: 'The other thing is I'm a piano player. You ran into a great deal of resistance with critics if you were a piano player because you were too schooled. You knew too much. You knew how to manipulate the system and therefore were suspect. There's the suspicion that, like, you took piano lessons, that you were a privileged kid, that you had a grand piano in your house.'
