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

I look forward to that! Spoiler alert, I like both JJ and the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhn4mH3uA1A

I Don't Want To Be Alone starts Side Two by dialing down the keyed-up stressed-out intensity, for a somewhat garbled tale of quarreling lovers making up, or an affair, or a pro domme session, or something.

Since I don't have much to report here, I'll use this space to amend my album introduction, which neglected to mention that the record won Joel the recently-established Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance (Male). Apparently he won for the whole album, even though the other nominees (indeed nearly every nominee in the category's history) were there for individual songs (Jackson Browne's "Boulevard," Kenny Loggins's "I'm Alright," Paul McCartney's "Coming Up," and Bruce Springsteen's 'Detroit medley' - "Devil With a Blue Dress," etc.). Glass Houses was also nominated for Album of the Year, which you'll recall was won the year before by 52nd Street; the other losers were The Wall, Sinatra's Trilogy, and Streisand's Guilty and the statue went to Michael Omartian as the producer of Christopher Cross.

• Why would he feel so uncomfortable wearing a suit and tie when he's one of the few rock star guys who regularly wears one onstage?

• I nominate this one as the Ronnie Spector song of this album.

• Good Lord, the Grammys have always sucked, haven't they? Though Pink Floyd walking into a room with Sinatra and Streisand and only ... Christopher Cross comes walking out, man, that's a scene right there.

https://i.imgur.com/j0hKNtV.jpg

But ain't that America, home of the free. Little Glass Houses for you and me.

https://i.imgur.com/l9yQDCf.jpg

Miss D. Boon every day.

D. Sutherland more like, from the teeth and the glint in his eyes

i love that every single one of these billy joel youtubes features the comment "this is my favorite song from my favorite billy joel album"

i like the song a lot though. delivery v elvis costello

like a blender smoothie of Blinded By The Light & Hold The Line & Video Killed The Radio Star

"all for leyna" vs. "hold the line" vs. "jane" vs. "fantasy" vs. "blinded by the light" vs. half the buggles catalog would be another good thread that's maybe already been done.

― fact checking cuz, Monday, September 25, 2017 10:53 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"fantasy" by aldo nova, "runaway" by bon jovi

i like the song a lot though. delivery v elvis costello

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Tuesday, September 26, 2017 10:20 AM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is really "My Aim is True" era Elvis C

AH'M AVOIDIN' ALL THE HARD COLD FACTS I GOTTA FACE

this really does sound like My Aim is True-era EC, which makes sense as most of the old guard (Nicks, Buckingham, Simon) were obsessed with him 1979-1979.

that's a very specific range, Alfred

you bet!

ugh All for Leyna is just terrible, sorry. Aside from the lyrical sentiment the gratingly punchy stiffness of it is really unpleasant, this rigid 4/4 grid pattern that alternates between half-time and double-time that never swings or moves at all, it's like some archetypal "white guys have no rhythm" joke.

I Don't Want to Be Alone is def in the EC school, as noted, doesn't really do anything interesting with it though

AH'M AVOIDIN' ALL THE HARD COLD FACTS I GOTTA FACE

So wait, did he successfully avoid them, or does he in fact gotta face them?

maybe it's two separate phrases

"I"m avoiding all the hard cold facts / I've got a face"

He has to face them but he's not doing so. Works for me. I just have no idea what the plot is - from stanza to stanza it feels like a totally different situation is being described, a failing that's cropped up earlier in songs like "My Life," that at least get by on catchiness and a sense of shared attitude among the pieces.

yeah he is consistently a sloppy and careless lyricist

Ehhh I don't know about that - more like there are songs he put in that extra time on, and songs where he sort of went with the first draft, or different chunks written at different moments without him making a final decision "okay the song's about THIS so i do need to rewrite that other part from when I thought it was about THAT."

On the other hand, he does tell an anecdote about how "It's Still Rock And Roll To Me" - I'm 90% sure that's the song in question - had no final lyrics until the day of recording, and he was scribbling it all down in the back seat of a car with Liberty, heading in to the studio from Long Island. And that one I think actually is very much on-topic, whatever other quibbles one might have.

I nominate this one as the Ronnie Spector song of this album

absolutely. he makes it rather explicit during the fadeout. ohh-ohh ohh-ohh ohhh-ooh-ohhooh.

i see the elvis costello thing, too, but this song just seems so ... minor. and not quite of a piece with the rest of the album. a weird choice for side 2 track 1, especially considering the options that lay ahead.

also, he sounds like he had a cold when he did the vocal. if there's a less sexy way to deliver "ooh it's so erotic having you tell me how it should feel," i can't imagine what it would be.

I get that I'm a bit more lyrics-fixated than the average listener but there's just too many clunkers and shitty POVs in his lyrics for me to really rate him, and this listening exercise has only clarified that for me, whether it's the clumsy character details in Piano Man or the casual misogyny (so many to choose from!) or the half-assed attempts at Dylan, Fagen or Costello, the guy rarely delivered anything that comes across as self-assured and fully formed. His best pieces seem to consistently be (like "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me") tossed off, snotty pastiches that get by by virtue of clever melodic phrasing and delivery, and not so much on interesting details or depth or mise-en-scene or juxtapositions or ambiguity.

maybe "self-assured" is the wrong word there (he's got plenty of righteous-anger-by-way-of-crippling-inferiority-complex thing going on), just that he never seems to hit on a lyrical approach that really has a solid foundation, a clearly thought out style, a voice, he's too busy second-guessing himself.

and when he does seem to be at his most uniquely Billy-Joelian heartfelt and honest (whatever those things mean in the context of 70s singer-songwriter-dom) the sentiments that do come to the fore are invariably creepy and off-putting (Always a Woman, You May Be Right)

(please note I am not arguing that Billy needed to be more "authentic" or whatever, just that when he chose to adopt that as a songwriting strategy it inevitably came out gross - whereas his other strategies - going for a Bruce or Dylan homage, for example - just come off forced and inadequate)

i agree with so much of what you're saying and yet, I like him! Gotta think on this some more, 'cause these are faults that I would find really glaring in some other writers.

I consider myself more than adequately familiar with the creative output of Declan Patrick Aloysius Macmanus. The vocal delivery of "I Don't Want To Be Alone" certainly has similarities to MAIT-era Elvis, but the underlying music is... sloppier? More American? Funkier? I'm not sure how to describe it.

rarely delivered anything that comes across as self-assured and fully formed. His best pieces seem to consistently be (like "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me") tossed off, snotty pastiches that get by by virtue of clever melodic phrasing and delivery

Well, yeah. My take is that he gets to a point with a given lyric where he says "this is good enough for a single" and figures it will do fine in the marketplace. And it generally DOES do fine in the marketplace. Partly because of his general bravado, but partly because his mad skillz as a melodist, musician, and all-round hitmaker are pretty solid.

Put it this way: if your third draft usually gets you into Casey's top 40, what incentive do you have to write a fourth draft?

i think it's also that billy, more than many or most of his peers, is a pure music-first guy. he strikes me as the kind of composer who, having finished a piece of music, doesn't ask himself "what do i want to say?" but rather "what do i have to do to finish this thing?" i think a lot of, ahem, honesty will come out that way, 'cause if you're just throwing words out into the air to make them fit a melody or to finish an exercise, chances are pretty good they're going to carry some of your inner being along with them. with billy, that means a lot of insecurity, anger, bitterness, paranoia and random memories and nostalgia. but it's passive messaging. he's not trying to express ideas so much as they just kind of tumble out as he searches for serviceable rhymes and turns of phrases.

otm

yeah that sounds about right

Brilly Joel school of songwriting

https://frinkiac.com/img/S04E12/740539/medium.jpg

Popped into my local record shop and they've got two copies of this album in the new-arrivals bin, right next to each other! It's in the collective unconscious.

I think Billy favors the sound of words over the meaning - in the interviews that DC has posted, he said he usually comes up with the lyrics last. Obviously he's not going as far as Eno, but he's really good at choosing words that are memorable and fit his rhyme scheme, at the expense of a stupid line and mixed message here and there

basically fcc otm

However, he doesn't strike me as a lazy songwriter, even lyrically. I just think his priorities are more skewed towards sounding good than meaning good. Stupid lines are often among the most memorable in a song anyhow

otm

Stupid lines are often among the most memorable in a song anyhow

ha. and true. see also: billy's old tourmate elton john.

And Neil Diamond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7lpvVf2rCY

Sleeping With The Television On is one of my very favorite Joel deep cuts and has been stuck in my head almost every day since we started this album. Though another step into Costello/Jackson territory, it also arrives at something very much like peak-period Hall & Oates, which is more than okay by me. Whether he knew the Dictators' Sleepin' With the TV On, I cannot guess.

the only album track Christgau liked!

except for the rinky-dink organ it works though

"Tomorrow morning, you'll wake up to the white noise." <--- one of my favorite WMJ lines. Just how he ends the verse with it.

Have we used up all the sound effect intros on this album yet? Glass breaking, touch-tone telephone, Star-Spangled Banner... Roger Waters must've been sitting next to his speakers, tapping his front teeth with a biro, going "Hmm. This guy's good."

And what are we going to use when we record our cover? The sound of the OnDemand menu blaring about La La Land available now! in the New Movies section?

Keyboard solo definitely EC. But it's all pretty tight. Liberty DeVitto should've been pretty happy with the way this one turned out.

For real my favorite or second-favorite track on this album. This veers straight into power-pop territory -- replace all the keyboards with guitars and I could imagine this being a track from Cheap Trick or the Real Kids. And he knows exactly what the song needs, too, with the major verses/choruses and relative minor bridges. It's right out of the Beatles handbook.

One of the best drum parts evah. I love the stab guitar and the sideways open-hat stuff (like under "just for the night ^ boys ^ ^"). One definitely hears Costello and Jackson.

otm on drumming and stab guitar

key hook for me is the way billy's lyric saves most of its syllables until it's going over the "all night long" backing vox, it's like sleater-kinney's intertwined guitar lines or something. obv this is also where liberty really shines with those high-speed fills.

What a jam - this might beat out "All for Leyna" for best new find. I love songs that are so efficient - intro, verses, choruses, TWO iterations of the bridge, solo, outro - there's a lot packed into 3:05! "Locked Out of Heaven" basically uses the same intro as this song, and it was a good steal on Bruno's part

I feel like this is just the right AMOUNT of the Star-Spangled Banner too -- starting on the "and" creates this tension that's not really resolved until Billy starts singing.

I loved this when this album came out and I don't think I knew what powerpop WAS then. Now I get it and agree he's going for that.

Damn I love the way he delivers "It just might be somebody else's same old line" on the second go-round. When he's literally repeating a line! In fact it's more like "It j-just" -- never noticed he STAMMERS that line the second time!

I really never realized how MUCH of Joel's shtick is writing songs that sound like love songs but are actually about how much of a hopeless schnook he is and how he hates himself, with the woman's role less as love object and more as living proof.