1974 · Behind the Songs
Written while Joel was living in Los Angeles, this stomping deep cut is both a tribute to the city’s dreamers and a confession of homesickness.
Before Billy Joel became New York’s unofficial poet laureate, he spent several years in exile in Los Angeles — and he was not entirely happy about it. “Los Angelenos,” tucked onto his 1974 album Streetlife Serenade, is the sound of a Long Island kid trying to make sense of the strange, sun-bleached city he had landed in. It is funky, affectionate, and quietly homesick all at once: a portrait of Los Angeles painted by someone who admired the place but never quite felt at home there. For a songwriter who would later be defined by his New York identity, it is a fascinating document of the years when that identity was still being formed, and of the city he had to leave to understand what home meant.
The reluctant Californian
Joel’s California years were complicated. In the early 1970s, after contractual tangles with his first label, he had relocated to Los Angeles, where he even performed in piano bars under an assumed name. He was a New Yorker by birth and temperament — born in the Bronx, raised on Long Island — and the West Coast never fully claimed him. “Los Angelenos” grew directly out of that displacement. The song’s narrator is an outsider looking in, cataloging the city’s transplants and dreamers with a mixture of fascination and gentle mockery. Writers have described its theme as “Left Coast displacement,” and you can hear the homesickness humming underneath every bar.
What makes the song unusual in Joel’s catalog is its generosity. For all its edge, “Los Angelenos” is fundamentally affectionate toward its subjects — the strivers and drifters who came to Los Angeles from somewhere else. The lyrics celebrate the city’s diversity, its parade of newcomers chasing reinvention, even as they note the peculiar melancholy of a place where everyone seems to be, in the song’s memorable phrase, “goin’ nowhere.” It is a postcard from a man who could see the appeal of the dream factory while recognizing that he himself was never going to buy what it was selling.
A funky departure
Musically, “Los Angelenos” was a departure for Joel. Built on a funky, insistent rock groove with a prominent electric piano, it “rocks out” harder than anything he had recorded since his days with the band The Hassles, as biographer Fred Schruers has noted. The track runs three minutes and forty-one seconds of lean, propulsive energy — no wasted motion, no orchestral sweetening. Author Mark Bego praised the way it captured Joel’s West Coast years “beautifully, with a critical eye.” There is even a curious footnote for trivia lovers: its melody bears a passing resemblance to Bruce Springsteen’s “Fire,” a song written just after.
The recording was cut in 1974 in North Hollywood with producer Michael Stewart, for the album Streetlife Serenade, released that October on Columbia. The album was a transitional record — Joel’s third for the label, made while he was still searching for the sound and the audience that would define him. “Los Angelenos” was never released as a commercial single in America, which is one reason it remains a deep cut. But Billboard’s reviewers, surveying the album, flagged it as one of the “best cuts,” an early sign that the song had more life in it than its modest origins suggested.
The critics argue
Few Joel songs have divided critics quite like this one. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called it “stomping” and counted it among the album’s “few winners.” Schruers judged it Joel’s “best attempt to sketch a portrait of” Los Angeles. But others were less kind. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden dismissed it as a “hackneyed picture postcard of L.A. as sexual wasteland,” while critic Paul Evans found its “narrative vignettes” straining “to be clever.” Author Hank Bordowitz detected a “cynical quality” in the performance. The disagreement is part of what makes the song interesting: it is Joel at his most ambivalent, and ambivalence makes some listeners uncomfortable.
A second life on stage
Like many of Joel’s best deep cuts, “Los Angelenos” found its second life in concert. A live version recorded in July 1980 at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, was included on Songs in the Attic (1981), the album of live recordings with which Joel revisited his early catalog. Erlewine praised the remake’s “fuller, better arrangement,” noting that the song “hit harder” on stage than it had in the studio. A black-and-white 16mm promotional film was made for the song, and in 1981 it was even released as a promotional single in Japan — a small but telling sign of the devotion Joel’s Japanese audience felt for every corner of his catalog.
What to listen for
Play the Streetlife Serenade original back to back with the Songs in the Attic live version and you will hear a songwriter discovering what the song was for. The studio cut is tight and wiry, all electric piano and forward motion; the live take is bigger, looser, and more confident — the sound of a man who had finally figured out where he belonged and could afford to be generous about the place he left behind. Listen for the groove first, then for the tenderness underneath it. “Los Angelenos” is that rarest of things: a kiss-off you can dance to, and a love letter written by someone already packing his bags.