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

Man, we're in the sweet spot right now. At least three more albums of cream until we hit a few slow spots.

All of his 1976-1983 albums are stronger that any album he made outside of that period, right? Best band, best producer, best songs.

Yeah that's pretty solidly the C.W. He's an artist with a pretty distinct "classic period" that most fans agree upon, and refusing your 1976-1983 timeframe would be pretty challopsy imo. (That said, I'm sure there are die-hard Billy fans who consider The Bridge or River of Dreams their favorite albums - YouTube comments are great for a reminder that for any artist that's sold as much as Billy, any given forgotten, underwritten album track is somebody's favorite song out of all songs ever recorded by anybody.)

and aww, thanks pplains!

I think I'm on record as being pretty pro-Billy, but I suspect I will not be participating very enthusiastically by the time it gets to River of Dreams. Just sayin. And I say this as someone who unabashedly loved Storm Front.

My senior prom's theme song was "This is the Time." Again, just sayin.

Can't wait till we get to track 12 of

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Billy_Joel_-_Fantasies_%26_Delusions.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuV-zEqB2QQ

Until the Night is this album's big ol' prom ballad. A single in Europe, it peaked at #50 in the UK and went nowhere anyplace else. A couple of years later, it got a cover by Righteous Brother Bill Medley, a rare case of one of Joel's heroes actually taking on one of his written-in-the-style-of numbers. Two decades later, he'd induct both Brothers into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b8/Until_The_Night.jpg/220px-Until_The_Night.jpg

Rosalinda's Eyes - cosign what fcc said, this needs a hook. I like the quiet recorder solo though, a strange but fitting addition

Half A Mile Away - there's potential here, but they needed to go all the way with this to make it into the Elton John song it could have been. it seems like him and the band aren't fully committed. the mix doesn't really showcase the groove either

Until the Night - damn, those are some low notes at the beginning - doesn't even sound like him. At least this one hits the Righteous style on the head, but it's not a style I particularly like

until the night - feel like i've been a downer all week, but this way-too-on-the-nose homage is really not good. a lovingly produced and performed nothingburger. i do kinda like billy's attempt to be both bill medley and bobby hatfield, which he pulls off especially nicely in the bridge. which then gives way to richie cannata doing a clarence clemons homage, which serves as a helpful reminder that "until the night" would have been the 75th or 76th best song on born to run if only given the chance. my least favorite song on my least favorite of billy's classic albums.

as long as we have hall & oates and white philly soul on our minds, i will note that h&o had a a #12 pop hit with their cover of "you've lost that lovin' feeling" two years later. they were less faithful.

(in related unrelated news, hall & oates could be a fun listening thread one day.)

(YES IT WOULD)

Would like to see the video of the Billy Joel brothers singing this duet, crossfaded into each other whenever one takes a verse.

I feel like I could just repeat my comments on "Half a Mile Away" here: I get Billy's affection and aptitude for this kind of song, but he hasn't yet figured out how to infuse his homages with any kind of distinctive voice, as he would on An Innocent Man/. He's still hung up on simply doing Ray Charles or, here, The Righteous Brothers.

I was listening the other day to Billy's Sirius chatter about An Innocent Man, and hearing him present "Tell Her About It" as a classical piano piece kind of crystallized my sense that he was always some kind of postmodern stylist of no particular genre loyalty, trapped in a blowsy sweaty bandleader's career. His early instinct, that he wanted to be writing material that other people would cover, was one-half correct: he's always writing in someone else's voice, trying on someone else's clothes. It can be an awkward fit because he's still performing it with the basic tools of this hard-working pop-rock bar band; he's liberated on that one album by stepping forward and saying "this is an album of pastiches of different styles."

One part of me basically wishes he'd just done that from day one, every album a gimmick, "this is my Elton John one" or whatever - closer to a Bowie/Madonna model. The other part of me, though, just loves the particular combination his Tin Pan Alley ear formed with this particular hard-working pop-rock bar band. On the best songs - and there are a lot of them, over this long golden period - it all locks together so wonderfully that those arrangements and performances really become inseparable from the strengths of the songwriting. (That's not even considering how much those particular musicians probably contributed to the songwriting, as we've touched on before.)

whoa i got way behind ... sorry guys!!

lemme do some catchup:

Stilleto - really like this. Cannata's sax is great especially in the bridge, and I love the buildup in the chorus. Good stuff!!

Rosalind's Eyes: feels like a cousin to Just The Way You Are music wise but uuuugh the slight latino/cubano spin he's putting on the delivery is yuk.
The keyboard riff sounds like a 70's era local tv affiliate morning show, i like that a lot. Hard pass on the piccolo/flute/recorder/dog whistle solo though. Bleh

Half A Mile Away - good stuff, very bouncy! Alfred otm re white Philly soul vibes. Also on that tip the horns give me a real Bill Conti/Gonna Fly Now vibe. Doctor C is otm too that the band & Billy arent quite nimble enough to pull off the playfulness needed to make it work *perfectly* ... they're not quite relaxed enough or something. But it still works & is kinda fun. Definitely sounds like a 70's sitcom theme song

Until The Night - uhhh yeah that low register doesn't work for me at all! ABORT.
i had to nope out halfway through.
It's so funny that Bill Medley really did record a version bc as soon as it started I was like, "oh god Billy's trying to do Bill Medley nooo nonononono make it stop"
Medley's version is nice, a lot easier to listen to that's for sure. It's a decent song but yeah jeez stay outta that low register Billy

In his induction speech for the RB's he mentions having tried to do a song with both their parts. "I failed. But it was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot."

lol, at least he's a good sport

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6sEc_WsoeA

52nd Street is the album-closing title track - a little two-and-a-half-minute jam with a couple of vocal surprises. But does it generate a lotta heat?

ray charles fronting steely dan with woody allen standing by for a clarinet solo? i can't quite put my finger on why, but this one has always made me smile.

as an album-ending palate cleanser, it reminds me in a way of steely dan's "throw back the little ones." which also makes me smile.

I like it more than the other side 2 songs but it's still a bit slight. pleasant though. this was a very front-loaded album, and I think a big step down from The Stranger

David Leeon Rothsell?

I like this one too. Glad it's under three minutes though.

I already don't like Billy in Ray mode, and this one adds some annoying background vocal yelps.

All in all, a strange choice for a follow-up to a hit album. You'd think the impulse would be to follow The Stranger with more of the same, but Billy took a left turn with an album of classical genre homages. Either he or the record company had the good sense to front load the album with a couple of radio-ready singles (which obviously paid off), but still, there is something admirably risky about asking your newfound audience to accompany you on a tour of jazz, soul and pre-rock vocal pop rather than giving them The Return of the Stranger. I don't think that most of it works, but Billy clearly made the record that he wanted to make.

I think it's a good record with its own vibe, and yeah, one assumes the label mainly wanted a "Stranger II." If you lop off the most jammy/jazzy bits that's basically what they recorded; it just didn't have quite the same back-bench of hits. I do get the impression it takes Billy a while to write, and he's talked about how it's particularly tough to write on tour when you play a grand piano that isn't exactly going to come up with you to the hotel room. Compared to Streetlife Serenade, this doesn't feel remotely like a writer's block album, but some of the extended jazzier passages do double duty as covering for what would by pop standards be incomplete songs - missing a bridge or a real emotional story or what have you.

This song is the closest to a "well's run dry" moment - one main piano riff alternating with some miscellaneous chords, marking space for improvisations and vocal ad-libs. It works cause it does fit the vibe of the record so well (and cause I love the idea of Joel hearing "Runnin' With The Devil" and thinking "this is just what I've been looking for on that Boz Scaggs tribute!"), but you can't get away with too much of this unless your band is really comfortable just easing into a groove and fucking around/playing off each other (Exile on Main Street) or the thing has such a good hook it doesn't matter (Midnight Rider). I love the Joel band for their tightness and punchiness as a singles act, but I don't think they had any great jamming instincts held back in reserve. But yeah, nice track and overall a nice record - maybe his fourth-best.

If anything can sum up the second-generation VHS recording of a film dolly awkwardly tracking around dark corners and shady alleyways of a first-term Ed Koch Midtown NYC - all with a chromatic chyron covering the screen with a generic street address - - - - it's this song.

Which, baby, is a near-bullseye in my wheelhouse.

"Until the Night" sounds like an attempt at writing a low budget Righteous Bros song.

he's talked about how it's particularly tough to write on tour when you play a grand piano that isn't exactly going to come up with you to the hotel room

Wait, I was given to understand that he does his writing on his road guitar, and makes his living in a pyano bar. I feel so misled.

http://www.onefinalserenade.com/uploads/2/9/1/2/2912571/billy-joel-glass-houses-ad-hes-got-a-little-something-for-ya_orig.jpg

Following another year of intensive touring, Joel hit the studio in the winter of 1979/80 to knock out another slab of tunes with Phil Ramone and Jim Boyer. In this long making-of interview, Joel describes the album in terms of the group "becoming a garage band all over again [...] to make music that all the musicians enjoyed playing, as if we were in a bar," as well as club exposure to new wave. He also likes to point out that all the arena shows had also made him think more about what played well at that scale.

Meanwhile, the title and the cover (featuring Joel's own house) showed a desire to "shatter" his image of himself as a ballad guy. (This studio chatter with Ramone, including some unflattering impressions of punk bands doing promo, focuses on how to promote the album without 'giving it away.') It was in any case his attempt to push back against the critics; Rolling Stone didn't bite, but a few months later, they put him on the cover with a "gutsy" and pretty interestingTimothy White interview re-establishing his street credentials. Perhaps they were impressed by the album's six-week stint at #1 during the summer in 1980, buoyed by four hit singles including Joel's first #1. It's been certified seven times platinum, and RS's 2013 readers' poll crowned it as his second-best album, behind The Stranger.

https://img.discogs.com/bUiYI68vScbS5ARu9vY0jzCF40w=/fit-in/600x599/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702113.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/r5wKNBOEKMcV_cY1ZurC-Vix6s8=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702120.jpeg.jpg

https://img.discogs.com/RfYOOscRmtny4QY4CTfV4Xn3aFI=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702182.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/nFS5-9DpHU6jXE9b0cU7DkOSrO8=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1674121-1315702188.jpeg.jpg

Oh yeah and it's called Glass Houses. First song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilsv0C1-aBw

You May Be Right, in most markets the lead single, opens the album with a literal smash. It peaked at #7 in the US and #6 in Canada, and made the top 40 in Australia and New Zealand.

The video - a minute shorter, with a different take and no glass-breaking! - can be enjoyed here. The footage was also used for this delightful TV commercial for the album.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/YouMayBeRight.jpg

oh good – I hadn't disliked a Joel song in a couple weeks.

^^^ alfred, only proving he's insay-a-ayne

Friday night HULK SMASH YOUR PARTY
Saturday, Hulk say HULK SORRY
Sunday came,
HULK SMASH IT OUT AGAIN

― Doctor Casino, Monday, March 19, 2012 2:51 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still laughing.

Also, wonder if he really did walk like this through Bed-Sty:

https://i.imgur.com/RQDU6bu.gif

"Glass Houses" was the second rock album I ever owned -- the first being "Get the Knack," which I bought on cassette at the tender age of 9. This one was given as a Christmas gift to me in 1980 by my Aunt Debbie, who was only 10 years older than I was. So any objective thoughts about the songs on this record are inevitably colored by nostalgia. Still, I really do love this record a lot, and I think this is a great opener. 11-year-old me had no idea what a "Bedford-Stuy" was. I had to ask my dad, who as a Brooklyn guy was very amused.

I have to decide which Joel I dislike least: the piano man chanteur? the rock and roll belter? the pastiche-er?

I can't remember ever not knowing all the words to this (tho maybe I had some other notion of what this "Bedford's Tie" was) but I do have a specific memory of being baffled by its adultyness, on a phone call with a 7th grade friend who also liked Joel, when she confronted me with the lyric "you were lonely for a man, I said take me as I am" : did I know what this meant? Uh oh - apparently she did, and I didn't. No explanation was forthcoming, but clearly I had a lot to learn about the world.

Anyway, I think it's a great little rock single, and actually in the course of this project I've become a little less skeptical of the makeover of Billy Joel as a self-destructive drunken asshole. Like idk, songs very much in character, shrug. The motorcycle still seems an awkward fit, even though he did in fact ride one, and survived a could-have-killed-him accident a couple years ago. But as Stones pastiches go, it beats what the Stones themselves were putting out around this time, trading their instrumental virtuosity for well-calibrated caveman crowd-pleasers from Liberty, and doling out a few bonus hooks along the way. Always glad when we get around to that penultimate variation on the title: you maaaay be wrong, for all I KNOW you may be right. (Versus say "She's So Cold" where a stanza or two in it's like, ugh, is this over soon? but you know you have to sit through several more minutes of sameness.)

In real life, of course, I would find this character loathsome. If someone was writing this out as a blog post or meme trying to win over a justifiably uninterested woman, I'd be infuriated. As with "Only The Good Die Young," it really depends on us charitably assuming that the woman in question would basically corroborate his version of their dysfunctional relationship, and declare that she's into it. Unlike that song, we don't have the other way out, where the narrator is an endearingly inept kid attempting a seduction with secondhand lines that are never going to go any further than psyching himself up in the mirror. This guy on the other hand is just a POS; at best, he's *her* POS and she wouldn't want him any other way.

Seriously? "She's So Cold" has a taut mastery – that instrumental break! – and an excellent vocal that knows when to get out of the way.

This was the first Billy Joel album I had, the only one I've ever truly loved, and so to me this just IS who Billy Joel is; it's the 70s ballads, encountered later, that read to me as a reinvention-reaction.

obv I agree that "You May Be Right" is part of the New Wave train jumping trend.

yeah idk "she's so cold" has just never done anything at all for me. ditto "start me up" which basically displays all its tricks in the snippet used to promote windows 95 (where I first heard it), and they're mostly lifted from "thunder island" anyway. I like the sound of the recordings okay but they're just not what I look for from the stones.

and ahahaha thanks pplains. that post might be one of my two or three proudest moments on ilx. tho the key imo is tarfumes's setup observation that billy "must have turned into the Hulk or something" to flip over his giant Yamaha onstage.

Casino, you evidently haven't heard my karaoke version of "She's 'So Cold."

I love the Chris Kimsey-engineered self-produced Stones mall rat era (I'm not a "Start Me Up" fan).

As a kid, I learned what the Combat Zone and Bed-Stuy were from this song.

This one to my ears fits "[song / album] basically invented [band / genre]" -- this is the ur-text for Quebec bar-band rock.

Billy Joel, New Wave--I fail to see the problem.

catching up!:

"zanzibar": i think this is my favorite billy joel song???? which is mostly bc it's billy simulating a steely dan song and doing it extremely well????

"stiletto": i love this song even though billy's vocal on it is fucking bizarre. such a sharp, excitable arrangement, the bridge especially. feel like a lot of his best songs are generated from this kind of irascible excitability which i feel is embodied in the live clip of "zanzibar" where he runs across the stage just to play a solo on a hammond organ

"rosalinda's eyes": the opening groove is so lush and centerless and but it gets mushy and undistinguished from there. like many of dude's deep cuts it feels like a draft for a better song he never ended up writing. the all-percussion coda is a nice touch

"half a mile away": hell YEAH. horns! buy a cheap wai-yine!!! i guess this song could revolve around a stronger hook but it nails the philly soul vibe so well that i don't mind "wordless flights into falsetto standing in for the hook." i feel tremendous unearned affection for this song lol

"until the night": wtf is up with billy's voice. stop it, my dude. six minutes of posturing that doesn't actually assemble into a song. why is this song so long, why won't it stop. i'm glad he starts singing normally in the fourteenth verse or whatever and the sax solo is incredible but i'm so tired and here comes that underwritten chorus again, thankfully it is the year 2177 and i am a skeleton whose ears have been reduced to mute unresonating bones

"52nd street": yeah some more of those collapsing steely dan-esque chords billy! no not more of your ray charles imitation wtf!!!

"you may be right" is a fuckin jam ofc though i remember the guitar riff in the chorus being more muscular than it actually is. any punk covers of this shit

i'm surprised that after the relatively self-assured the stranger that so much of the second side of 52nd street is devoted to identity crisis but about half of those songs are great anyway

it's hard for me to separate any positive feelings I have for this song from nostalgia because it is SO goddamn ridiculous (albeit catchy). Is this the first thing he put out with *no* piano on it?

animated gifs from this album's videos will never not be funny tho

"You may be right" is what drunk old guys with bandannas on their foreheads sing when they wander around parking lots

"You may be right" is what drunk old guys with bandannas on their foreheads sing when they wander around parking lots

― calstars, Thursday, September 21, 2017 9:20 AM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also, in my experience, in karaoke bars