‘I Never Liked My Own Voice’

Lots of people like listening to Billy Joel sing, but not the Piano Man himself.

In a new interview with John Mayer on the guitarist’s recently launched radio show How’s Life, Joel spoke about consistently feeling let down by his own vocal abilities.

“I always wanted to sing like somebody else — I never liked my own voice,” he said. “I would go in the studio and I’d do a recording and I’d come back in the control room and listen and go ‘Oh God, it’s that guy.’ And I’d always be disappointed — no matter how good I thought the writing was, I never liked my own voice. Always wanted to sound like somebody else.”

READ MORE: Top 20 Billy Joel Songs

One way he skirts around this, he says, is by trying to channel other singers he admires, including Ray Charles, Sting and Elvis Costello — “people with these wonderful voices,” he explained.

Billy Joel, Songwriter Not Singer

This is not the first time Joel has opened up about not liking his voice. He ran into the issue most recently when recording his newest single, “Turn the Lights Back On,” his first piece of original material in nearly two decades.

“Freddy [Wexler, the song’s co-writer and producer] asked me, ‘Are you thinking of somebody else when you’re singing?’ And I said, ‘Always,'” Joel said to WBLM-FM earlier this year. “I’m always trying to sound like not Billy Joel, because I don’t like my own voice. I like other singers. I’m a songwriter, because I can think about other people singing this stuff, not me.”

Joel has just one more concert on the books for 2024, scheduled for Dec. 31 in Belmont, New York.