IT'S BETTER THAN DRINKIN' ALONE: The Official ILM Track-by-Track BILLY JOEL Listening Thread

Joel didn't say it - his biographer did.

Was trying to recall how Movin' Out goes while cleaning, but it keeps turning into Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly in my head - something about that turnaround in the chorus is v similar

strumming my pain with his fingers, is that all you get for your money

GAH Cannot un-hear that now, thanks a lot.

who needs a house out in Hackensack, singing my life with his words

roberta flack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack

Heh

i liked that one, fcc

http://i.imgur.com/lhnr9IR.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr2PPHbgbmo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8oDW5UuxN0

huh, first one of those is kinda cool

About every sample of this I found had the vocals pitched up.

Guess you can take the boy out of the Cold Spring Harbor, but you can't take ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5ofVsxTPoc

The Stranger: one of the great whistlin' tunes of the album era. It was not released as a single in the US, but was included on the Greatest Hits, perhaps reflecting its #2 performance in Japan (or maybe FM airplay?).

Le trafic ralenti en Boulevard de Palais de Rue de la Hatchett jusqu'à Boulevard de Magenta ...

http://i.imgur.com/kdRwp44.png

I've always thought the Stranger was a high-quality track, even when I didn't particularly want to listen to it for the thousandth time. Thoughts in no particular order:

- Piano/whistle intro seems longer than necessary to me (because I know that there is RAWK coming and I am impatient). But hey, it was a time of expansive album tracks with contrasting sections. If you're like me and this one seems drawn-out, "Scenes" will be well-nigh interminable.

- The vocals on the verse sound boxy and a bit lo-fi. Perhaps an accident of recording technique but they do.

- The falsetto is an interesting choice for Billy. He's not as effective in this register, but I can understand wanting to try it on for a change.

- Lurve the finger cymbals or crotales or whatever on the chorus. Joel & co. do like to pull out the lush auxiliary percussion in ways that I think are generally spot on. One can't imagine "Say Goodbye" or "Don't Ask Me Why" without castanets, handclaps, etc. This stuff was more joyously prevalent in the 70s than in later pop. Pop percussion diverged into either a drumset-only camp (hard rock and metal) or genres in which the go-to accents tended to be electronic in origin, like the Cars' Simmonsy PEW PEW PEW.

- I also lurve the funkae rhythm guitar. I am not as fond of the thin lead guitar, but it would be 100X worse if that had been a sax lead.

The best moment in this song is the crash/rest, for example after "there are some we never tell KSSSH!!!" It reappears a few more times but I have always loved its high drama. I was schooled in keeping the beat going as a young drummer, and it took me a long time to learn how cool it can be if you stop for a bit before getting back into it.

excellent extremely crisp devitto groove on this song i definitely don't remember even though i undoubtedly heard it a lot

DeVitto's amazing on this song.

All sorts of changes in voice - "We all fall in love," "Don't (you) be afraid to try again," "I used to believe I was such a great romancer..."

I'm going to spare you the cover version I was associated with 20 years ago.

um please do not spare us!

YMP otm about the lavish percussion details on 70s records. i have no idea who plays what on this album, but ralph macdonald is credited for additional percussion; his resume speaks for itself.

ok now i know why i accidentally skipped all of turnstiles, "last of the great pretenders"/"weekend song" were such enthusiastically wrought nothingnesses that they made me tap out. streetlife is a real bummer

anyway i'm catching up

yeah i'm sorry about that album y'all

Dr. C, I do hope it was a specialist like MacDonald who added the CHING CHA-CHA-CHING finger cymbal work. It's an archetypal overdubbed "explore the studio space" kind of part; it would be hard for that to work live alongside a full drumkit.

DeVitto is a very good drummer - indeed, something of a hero to me - but I love it when he gets upstaged by auxiliary percussion (as he sometimes will later by Crystal Taliaferro, but let's not get too far ahead of the story).

weeeee i love this song

i will have more to say later

Personally I can't wait for VegemiteGrrl's take. Come back soon Veg!

I exhausted my target word count on Joelian lyrical expressions of middle-class boring duality some time ago, but this song remains the ur-example. For now I will just revel in the accented crash/rest:

there are some we never tell KSSSH!

that I could not recognize KSSSH!

and he is not always wrong KSSSH!

i heart liberty KSSSH!

that crash/rest is such a liberty thing to do KSSSH!

he can be corny sometimes too KSSSH!

and he did something to piss off our beloved billy KSSSH!

(or should we calling him joe?) KSSSH!

but i heart him like mad KSSSH!

liberty forever KSSSH!

not feeling this one personally, feel like it's comprised of a bunch of elements that don't work together, it's disjointed

Great creepy intro, great angsty/cocky vocal from Billy, great sleaze-funk guitar, great variety in the production, great song.

the whistling intro & outro is so cinematic -- somehow the piano makes me think of Chet Baker, reminds me of My Funny Valentine or some similar melody I can't quite place

funkay guitar is so good ... and i love how the chorus m shifts into a funkay samba beat

his exaggerated delivery of some of the words has always been a favorite of mine to mimic

LEATHAH
FYAH
DESIYAH

the whistling intro does sound like something that would show up in a Tarantino movie tbh

yeah that too!

haha i was about to bring up LeaTHUH. love that. this is another one that coded VERY strongly "adult" for me as a kid. this whole situation... "lovers," deceit, people resigned to how things "go south every now and then." it's very hard for me to hear it with fresh ears and say whether it still strikes me as grown-up. so it goes. i do think, in terms of the ongoing discussion of billy's lyrical persona, that his wise old observational pose benefits enormously from throwing himself into the situation ("once i used to believe...") even if it makes the lyric a bit of a jumble overall.

love the shift back and forth from the mean funky verse to the smooth evening chorus, a great late 70s version of loud/soft. i could imagine someone involved imagined this as some kind of musical representation of the 'stranger' concept, is the verse the 'real' and the chorus the smoothed-over facade? even without that, it's a lot like "we can work it out," shifting between cynical and optimistic characters. billy's john and paul sides warring it out more explicitly than usual. or, more contemporary, "short people." which was held off from #1 by "stayin' alive" (as well as "baby come back"). neat.

I had wrongly parsed that Christie Brinkley quote I posted upthread. I had remembered her saying that she used to hear it on an AM station in the middle of the night, down in the Metro stations.

Which sounds much more noir than being in her kitchen, waiting for her husband to come home.

Anyway, who in their right mind would use a low-tempo whistling intro for their traffic rep – ah yes, the French.

xpost sleeping with the television on, it sounds like

turning on all the christmas lights.

nice take on the verse/chorus contrast, Casino. boomin' post

Who Sampled Who says the main riff of ''Tha Shiznit'' is a (replayed) sample of The Stranger.

That's pushing it a little.

All the other samples on that page use the piano intro. Had no idea ODB was French.

xpost thanks! also just want to say "It was then I felt the stranger kick me right between the eyes" is a great ending to that verse and really killer delivery. billy's very big on finishing a verse with his strongest or at least most bilious line i think - "the entertainer" and "miami 2017" for example - both "all verse" songs - ride this hard. here the song still has other places to go, which is cool.

it's also a pretty cool premise for a song i think. i mean deceit and cheatin' hearts are everywhere in popular song, but this song's acceptance of constructed personas as a cruel but ubiquitous aspect of dating, practiced even by the one lamenting the deceit, is unusual, even in a decade apparently deeply concerned with back-stabbers (the o'jays), liars (three dog night) and people making fools out of each other (about a million yacht rock songs). i'll certainly take it over the uncomfortably tidy EVERYTHING'S FINE conclusion of, say, "escape (the piña colada song)."

Now here's a performance. May have been up in DC's Carnegie Hall link earlier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdLPI6XhEN8

Just realized in that clip that I've had the lyrics wrong (No surprise.) It's "Then I came home to a woman, that I could not recognize," not "But I came home to a woman, and did not recognize her."

nope, that's a different set! wonder if it's even really from those carnegie hall dates, despite the youtube caption. it's a nice performance but i didn't have the sense that the song was that fully formed before the album... part of the lore is that the whistling intro was billy demo-ing an idea to phil ramone and asking "what do you think for this, a flute maybe??" or something, and phil being like no, no, whistling, that's it!

a year before, i have to assume he would have played it on that trusty Moog! i am the whistling stranger, i kick between the eyes etc.

Tangential note: I've long thought that balding/sneery late-career-BJ piano face sometimes reminds me of a stock Buffy vampire.

https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/3/34588/878842-master.jpg

http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article3093224.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/MAIN-Billy-Joel.jpg

Just now occurs to me that perhaps Bill got that wrinkle from being kicked "right between the eyes" by the stranger.

The leap in confidence b/w Turnstiles and The Stranger is encouraging.

As a kid, I thought the line was "When I pressed her for a weasel"...

Doctor Casino otm about this feeling very "adult" to a kid's ears. Also continue's the Joelian feeling of a Long Islander in Manhattan, maybe missing the LIRR and getting pulled into Times Square.

yeah the masks of silk & leather, and the stuff about "your lover" etc felt very Adult to me as a kid

track sequencing also seems smart/interesting. generally the ramone joel records tend to open with a shorter, punchier rocker, followed by a slow ballady thing, closer to the piano man's milieu of evening adults being wistful and bittersweet and so on. here he's got two back-to-back rockers but it doesn't feel that way because of the whistling bookends, which puts us much more in the spirit of the "grownup" front cover than the "fun guys" of the back, and better sets up the ballads to come.

fantastic posts on this song from the good doctor and the mad puffin, and i'm basically here to say hell yes to both of them.

beyond that, i don't remember ever thinking much at all about this title track, but listening to it today, goddamn that's a good groove, and also goddamn for a guy who can be challenged when it comes to fleshing out ideas and characters, this song packs a lyrical punch and then develops it. "why were you so surprised that you never saw the stranger? / did you ever let your lover see the stranger in yourself?" is an, um, adult reckoning in the best possible way.

there's something stiff and yet cool about his refusal to contract "could not recognize" and "is not always wrong," jabbing at each and every syllable of each and every word like the boxer he is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaA3YZ6QdJU

Just The Way You Are, lead single for the album, became Billy Joel's biggest hit up to that point. In February 1978, it would top the Easy Listening chart for several weeks and reach #3 on the Hot 100 ("Piano Man," his previous best, peaked at #25). It similarly beat all his earlier efforts in Australia (#6), Canada (#2), and the UK (only #19, but they'd totally ignored him before that). A year later, it would win the Grammy awards for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, the first two of his five wins (counting a "Legend Award") and twenty-three nominations. SecondHandSongs identifies 131 recorded versions, and that's not even counting Maggie Gyllenhaal's. Billy having written it as a tribute to wife-plus-manager Elizabeth Weber, it faded from his own setlists a while after their 1982 separation, though it's returned in recent years.

Recording notes: Note that the sax here is not Richie Cannata, but Phil Woods, previously discussed with regard to the "New York State of Mind" alterations. For the single, they cut it down to 3:36, lunging straight for those smooth sax breaks and losing the "new fashion" stanza and the first pass through the "clever conversation" one. It is this version that appeared on the original LP, cassette, and CD versions of Greatest Hits I & II.

Again, per the lore gathered on Wiki, this was an almost-didn't-make-it-on-the-album track - Billy and the band didn't like it, but Linda Ronstadt and/or Phoebe Snow, hanging around in the studio, insisted upon it. However, the album's producer, Phil Ramone, later contradicted Joel's claim, stating in an interview that they could not afford to exclude the song because Joel did not have that much material to choose from for the album.[6] And wait, if they hated the song so much, why would they have been performing it in the first place? I smell myth-making... but anyway.

https://youtu.be/GLUNypEfrFQ?t=1m21s

The Rhodes is dreamy AF on this song. Grand piano would have been wrong.

Again, tasty extra percussion makes for great soft rock texture. Subtle little chimes, a woodblock, and a cabasa or maracas that are _almost_ lost inside the guitar. Probably when I was a kid listening to a crappy clock radio or Walkman or whatever, I wouldn't have been able to distinguish the guitar from the brushed snare from the shaker, but they're all there and they all add something.

Kudos to Liberty for hanging back and not overplaying. Dude could be corny (as cuz notes upthread) but he knew when to play it cool. I love the syncopated accent on the tom (... AND three ... three AND ... AND three).

Lots has been said and written about this lyric - whether it is dickish or not - and I'm not going to add to that pileon. But I do think it's among his top vocal performances in the history of ever. Maybe top among ballads. Especially the gently rising part of the melody (e.g., "I took the good times / I'll take the bad times"), the syrupy mmmmhhhhmmms.

The sax is perfect, especially after the false ending and into the fade. I suspect I was more familiar with the single version, which did not have as much fade. There's a lot in there.

I could not love you any better
I love you just the way you are.

http://i.imgur.com/FsZlhmM.jpg

- "Put it on a plate, son. You'll enjoy it more."
- "Couldn't enjoy it any more, Mom. Mm, mm, mmm."

A roar greeted the opening notes of “Just the Way You Are,” and up in Section 106 I could see some women of a certain age singing along and dabbing their eyes.

When the song was done, Joel turned to the audience and said, “And then we got divorced.”