Taylor Swift responds to Billy Joel comparing her to The Beatles: “that broke my brain”

Taylor Swift
(Image credit: Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

Everyone likes to receive a compliment now and then, but Taylor Swift says that hearing that Billy Joel had compared her to The Beatles in a recent interview “broke her brain”. 

When asked by USA Today to comment on the current crop of artists, Joel said: “Adele is a phenomenal singer, kind of a [Barbra] Streisand throwback. Taylor [Swift] is also a very talented girl and she’s productive and keeps coming up with great concepts and songs and she’s huge. You have to give her high marks. She knows music and she knows how to write. She’s like that generation’s Beatles.”

High praise indeed, and words that Swift was clearly taken aback by. Speaking to Extra, she said: “That honestly like broke my brain because that doesn’t seem like a real thing that would happen in life.

“I might have hallucinated it, maybe we had the same hallucination, because I don’t really know how to process words like that from someone like him, I’m a huge fan of his.”

Billy Joel recently released The Vinyl Collection Vol 1, an eight-album (nine-LP) boxset that includes ‘70s albums Cold Spring Harbor, Piano Man, Streetlife Serenade, Turnstiles, The Stranger and 52nd Street, plus 1981 live album Songs in the Attic and a previously unreleased live album, Live at The Great American Music Hall.

Ben Rogerson

I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it.