On a July 16, 2006 blog for the Australian newspaper The Herald Sun, Billy Joel said that the music for this song was inspired by the songs of Leiber and Stoller, which were recorded by Ben E. King and The Drifters. He added that the words came from personal experience.
The whole
An Innocent Man album was done in the style of 1950s and '60s popular music. It was Joel's homage to the '60s-era R&B that he grew up on as well as his own romantic experiences as a teenager. Joel said in
1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh, "Usually I agonize over every note, but this time the songs came pouring out of me."
The lyrics are about a woman who's afraid to take a chance on love because she's had her heart broken in the past. She's projecting her fears on to Joel, an innocent man who tries to reassure her that he's not like the other guys.
The impressive high note is a thing of the past for Joel, who passes it off to backing vocalists during live performances. But the singer knew his upper register wouldn't hold out forever. "I had a suspicion that was going to be the last time I was going to be able to hit those notes, so why not go out in a blaze of glory?" he recalled in a 1997 Billboard magazine interview. "That was the end of Billy's high note."
This was a #1 hit on the Adult Contemporary chart.
After exhausting himself with the creation of the thematically heavy and sonically complex album The Nylon Curtain, Joel wanted to cut loose and have fun. "I wanted to have a good time on the next recording," he told Sirius XM in 2016. "As it turns out, I was newly divorced, I was dating Christie Brinkley and Elle Macpherson. I was having a fun time, I felt like a teenager again. I wanted to recapture that feeling by writing songs that were stylistically from that era - from the early '60s, the late '50s, when rock and roll was a lot more lighthearted... it was a big departure from my earlier style to a lot of people, but it was a lot of fun."
Although Joel wanted to have a good time, he still took his time in the studio seriously, which is why he was so irked when his guitarists, Russell Javors and David Brown, were goofing around while he was having a discussion with producer Phil Ramone. Because the band didn't always take the easygoing producer's assertiveness seriously, Ramone had to come up with a different tactic.
In his 2007 book, Making Records: The Scenes Behind The Music, Ramone explained how he concocted a plan to get the guitarists back in line. He invited Eric Gale, a guitarist from Paul Simon's band, to sit in on the next session. Ramone instructed him to simply show up, sit between Javors and Brown, plug into his amp, and start to play.
"On the night of the session, Eric came in without saying a word. He sat down between David and Russell, and started playing during the first rehearsal. Russell and David didn't play a note - they just looked at him. We went to the next take, and Eric immediately fell in. I didn't speak to either Russell or David during the entire session; all of my comments were directed to Billy, Liberty, Eric, and Doug Stegmeyer. I could tell that my sternness - coupled with Eric's formidable presence - was rattling Russell and David.
After that session, Russell and David snapped back into line. 'Things are much cooler when you guys cooperate,' I said casually on the subsequent date. 'What we're doing isn't about you or me - it's about the guy at the piano."
