Billy Joel recently shared with Rock Cellar the inspiration behind his hit track ‘Uptown Girl.’ It turns out Joel tried to write a Four Seasons song and aimed to sound like Frankie Valli, as he revealed:
“I wrote ‘Uptown Girl’ toward the end of writing all the other songs on the ‘Innocent Man’ album. I was trying to recapture the music of my teenage years when I was growing up. I was trying to write a Four Seasons song and wanted it to sound like Frankie Valli.”
He shared that the song was different from everything that he had released before by saying:
“It was so different than anything I had written before. A lot of people thought I lost my mind. Once I had that rhythmic pattern with the foot stomps and the handclaps, it pretty much directed me to this marching nature of the song, which gave it that Four Seasons vibe.”
When it came time for lyrics, after his divorce, the singer had relationships with two of the most famous supermodels of the 1980s, so he wanted to write about it by saying:
“And then I was thinking, ‘What am I going to write about? Oh, I’m dating this beautiful woman, and my life is great right now. I’m in a really good mood. How can I write about that?’ It was essentially a celebration of life. Here I was, this divorced guy going out with this bombshell, and I wrote it about a poor downtown guy trying to win over a rich uptown girl. And what better way to record this than do a Four Seasons type of production?”
Joel’s vision for ‘Uptown Girl’ was a success since Frankie Valli and The Frankie Valli our Seasons gave a live performance of the track to honor Joel when he received the Living Legends Award in 1990. You can watch their performance below.
You can read Billy Joel’s interview with Rock Cellar here.
