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

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.”

yeah this has been my singing-in-the-shower song for a couple days running and i've foundered a few times on the question of dickishness. i think it basically is dickish, in places at least, to the point where in my reading he wrote "tell her about it" as a scold to the slightly younger man leaning on vague affirmations of "unspoken passion." but my god do i love this melody. seems unthinkable to me that anybody would come up with that and be even remotely hesitant about recording it.

the other great production touch that i've been noticing more: the lonnnnnng soft "ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" backing-vocal wash, straight out of "i'm not in love." not to keep flogging the pre-album carnegie hall performance, but it's worth pulling out that rendition (starts at 19:30) as a reminder of (a) how strong the bones of the song are and (b) just how much phil ramone brought to the table.

I can't deny its craft, its place in my childhood (one of my earliest musical memories), and its longevity. But I can't stand it.

About that backing vocal wash. Agree it's a great touch and I don't think I'd noticed it before today.

Did people sing that or is it like a mellotron or something?

I can't deny its craft, its place in my childhood (one of my earliest musical memories), and its longevity. But I can't stand it.

^^^this.

it really feels like a more curdled/less interesting Paul Simon song to me nowadays. Like I can almost hear Paul singing over this exact arrangement but with more subtlety and restraint and better lyrics

Solid burn, Οὖτις. Tough but fair.

Segueing right into this from "The Stranger" was a smooth move.

i like the straightforwardness of the verses, even if in places they could maybe use just the eensiest bit more specificity. though i suspect its vagueness helped it - everyone can relate! but the bridge for me, though it works really well melodically, feels like kind of a non-sequitur. how did we get to "what will it take til you believe in me?" an undeveloped thread of the situation. has he fucked up and needs to win her trust? or she's just not sure about this guy? it seems like they've been together a while - it's not a "falling in love" song. i dunno it just doesn't seem to have much to do with loving someone just the way they are.

I should add that judging BJ for not being as good as Paul Simon (or Paul McCartney or Lou Reed or Frank Zappa or, heck, Charles Mingus) is a tough standard. In looking at these songs, I'm trying to look at their place within the Joelian oeuvre. Y'know, relative to his capabilities, relative to his style, relative to his general Billyness.

I don't think His Billyness would appreciate being slotted beneath those guys by default. Seeing as how a key part of Billyness is resenting not getting enough respect.

"What will it take til you believe in me the way that I believe in you" frames the sentiment of the rest of the song for me. If his somewhat passive aggressive list of her attributes feels dickish, perhaps it is because it is his retort to her constant criticisms of him. Still plenty dickish, perhaps, though it gets to a flaw at the heart of these kinds of songs in general--we don't hear her (unclever?) side of it-- but if the lyric is a series of retorts, we can sort of fill in the blanks.

I'll help his Billyness out: "Just the Way You Are" >>> any Paul Simon solo song.

This is prime Billy Joel Velveeta cheese and I love it, unreservedly. Gorgeous vocals, dreamy Fender Rhodes and that cocktail-bar beat ... this is the Charlie perfume of 70's ballads

Please enjoy the version he sang on Sesame Street to Oscar the Grouch (with Marlee Matlin!)
<3 <3
https://youtu.be/hHC3M7KL2ns

I think he would at least believe he's supposed to be there in the list with McCartney and dig the idea that he's cool enough to be there with Lou Reed. No idea what he's ever said about Paul Simon but I suspect he views it as a misreading of himself to be put there - okay sure I sing and I write songs but I'm not a singer-songwriter, I'm a COMPOSER and a ROCK-AND-ROLLER. I imagine that the "they had to drag this song kicking and screaming onto the album" narrative reflects this... the last thing he wanted to be seen as was the Muzak needle-drop from that Blues Brothers bit. The next three albums, and Songs in the Attic, in various ways can be read as efforts to get out from under the success of this song and the box it probably put him into with millions of listeners who'd never heard "Captain Jack" or whatever.

Also on the subject of resentments and postures, I find the "clever conversation" line a fascinating bit of common-man positioning. It wouldn't take much to spin a silent-majority narrative where Billy gave voice to all those baffled by the urbane and wordy pop culture proferred by Steely Dan, Neil Simon and Woody Allen. But then I think: I bet Billy Joel *loved* Annie Hall. New York Jew, bundle of resentments, adolescent comprehension of relationships, love/hate relationship with Los Angeles... it's right up his alley. Maybe he really doesn't like clever conversation, but he does see himself as half an artist, with the dual role as the entertainer sometimes fitting naturally and sometimes feeling like a ball and chain.

Billy gave voice to all those baffled by the urbane and wordy pop culture proferred by Steely Dan, Neil Simon and Woody Allen

reason #247 why it never ever ever occurred to me he was actually jewish,