The Billy Joel Lyric That Secretly Took Aim at an Overbearing Family Member

Some songwriters have a knack for what might be called accusatory songs, ones that don’t hold back about a particular target. You can count Billy Joel in that category, as he’s always been able to express his ire about something or someone without letting it get in the way of his songwriting technique.

Perhaps nowhere has Joel ever sounded quite so harsh as on the song “Laura,” which is found on his 1982 album The Nylon Curtain. Many people assumed Joel was writing about a lover. But even though he hasn’t quite admitted it, it seems safe to say that the domineering woman described in the song’s lyrics was Joel’s mother.

Not a Great Mother’s Day Gift

Here’s the thing about “Laura”: There is nowhere in print where you can find Joel admitting the song is about his mother, to whom he had once dedicated the song “Rosalinda’s Eyes” in 1978. He gave few hints in early interviews about the identity of the subject, except to insist it wasn’t about his first wife Elizabeth, whom he was about to divorce when the song arrived.

As years went by, he did at least acknowledge that Laura was based on a family member. But he always made the point that the song could be about anyone who simply knows how to manipulate and aggravate in equal measure, as he explained in an interview at the time with the Daytona Beach Morning Journal:

“It’s about the guilt you get from someone in your family who knows just how to stick the knife in and wear you down. You’d be surprised how many people have a destructive relationship and don’t know it. Nobody has a right to do that to you; it’s against the law.”

It’s telling that the music to “Laura” is very reminiscent of late-period Beatles psychedelia. Joel has said he was very much feeling the influence of John Lennon, who was assassinated in 1980, while making The Nylon Curtain. This song falls very much in line with Lennon songs like “Sexy Sadie” that are not afraid to point the finger.

Looking at the Lyrics to “Laura”

Laura calls me in the middle of the night, Joel sings to start the song. Of course, the intrusion comes at the worst possible time, setting the tone for the annoyances that will be heaped on the narrator. Then these careless fingers / They get caught in her vice is the first of the many dire couplets that explain just how much damage this character does.

When Joel sings, All her life has / Been one long disaster, you can almost hear him rolling his eyes about her constant complaining. I fight her wars / While she’s slamming her doors / In my face, he laments of the double standard looming large over this relationship. The fact Joel drops an F-bomb in the middle eight—something he hadn’t done in a song to that point in his career—is a good indication of the depth of his anger.

The narrator suggests he’s a drug of sorts to this person, mainly because, as he says, All her questions / Will get sympathetic answers. When Joel asks, How can she hold the umbilical cord / For so long?, it seems like a dead giveaway as to this person’s identity.

In the final moments of the song, the narrator turns to the audience and throws up his hands: She always says / I’m the best friend that she ever had / How do you hang up on someone who needs you that bad? With that bit of symmetry, he brings us back to the original phone call. It’s clear, based on the specificity of his complaints in “Laura,” Billy Joel had received many of those calls, even if the song only hinted at the identity of the caller.

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