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

we actually struggled a great deal with his new jerseyness back in the day. the ones that match up in terms of high chart performance followed by seeming hollow and nobody cares about them are "the bridge" and "storm front" but neither really had "event" status in the first place and when you only put out one more album and then retire it's sort of hard to measure "career decline.". i think he doesn't have one.

pressure – i always heard this as billy singing to himself about writer's block. which manifests literally when the bridge comes around for a second time and he can't come up with any words for the first half of it (i.e. the two missing lines before "all your life is time magazine"). i like this song more than i used to. there's some really good singing here, and the writing and playing really does capture the anxiety he's singing about. it's a very very billy song that doesn't sound like any other billy songs. my favorite bit: the spoken-word "i'll tell you what it means." where else in his catalog does billy do that?

goodnight saigon – sometimes i think the universal, first-person-plural approach is smarmy and sometimes i think it's a perfect way to evoke the feeling of having to sacrifice everything including your identity. then he gets to "we would all go down together" and i stop worrying about any of that and realize it's both smarmy and great and it can still make me cry. this is as chilling as any line in any vietnam song: "they heard the hum of our motors / they counted the rotors / and waited for us to arrive."

she's right on time – god bless liberty for trying as hard as he does to find something to do here.

a room of our own – i have writer's block and i own some nilsson albums. this is one of those billy songs i never remember exists.

btw: man, I'm loving this thread. thanks again y'all.

i'm already struggling to remember the tune to rooms of our own. keep winding up at other, better songs built around this same lame theme, like alan jackson's "blue blooded woman." or even "the dangling conversation."

Been looking forward to this day for almost ten years now: a lol of our own

lol

The moderately blues-y, sorta old time-y rock 'n' roll homage is my least favourite kind of Billy Joel song, and this is that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdqAeRjel4

Surprises was inspired by Joel's motorcycle accident and his collapsing marriage. The Internet rustles with Lennon comparisons, but to my ears it sounds like a very focused attempt at a Nilsson song.

this is his New Jersey isn't it

― sleeve, Saturday, October 14, 2017 1:11 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nope! next album is a smash.

― Doctor Casino, Saturday, October 14, 2017 1:12 PM

the decade ends with his biggest album of the '80s.

yeah, i really don't think he has one. more like a stones career if they'd just retired suddenly in the early 90s. all commercially successful, none that obviously marks them going off a cliff, none that even hardcore fans would suggest belong in their career-spanning top five.

This isn't bad if self-consciously "adult," with DeVito saving the day.

(tbf though no way is 'storm front' bigger than 'an innocent man,' at least in the US - 4x platinum versus 7x, two top 40 hits versus five...)

oh for some reason I thought AIM was 4x platinum too -- my bad.

AIM was given the Thriller treatment.

Another snoozefest. Side B of TNC is really letting me down so far, particularly considering how I'd been long led to believe (mostly by C**** K*********) that this was, along with Glass Houses, one of the more solid Billy albums.

Thinking again how Springsteen’s Nebraska came out a week after this, if this were a more focused recession album those could have been more of a one-two punch.

Also, I’ve been waking up with these songs in my head more than any past listening thread. Still waking up to “Close to the Borderline” most mornings.

I like that filthy plucked bass in "A Room..." That's it. It's not terrible, but he can't resist thinking the chick needs yoga while he needs beer.

I still think this album's pretty solid - 'A Room Of Our Own' is pretty rote (although it's better than Christie Lee from the next album), but I like 'She's Right On Time' and 'Surprises' a lot. I guess the big conceptual pieces are the singles, and the remainder is a bit less remarkable. But he captures a Beatles vibe pretty well.

Given the tenor of the times, he probably needed to release the albums he did, with the songs that are on them. He needed that pace to stay in the public eye (especially given his early hiatus). And the albums needed about this many songs to be viable in the marketplace.

That said, I wonder if his legacy would be any different if he'd just released the songs on the first sides of these albums. Almost all of our fave hits are on side 1. Some combination of Bill and the production staff must have had a pretty good sense of what would work as a hit.

But equally, it wouldn't have made sense for him to release half as many albums, with twice as many hits per album.

The Internet rustles with Lennon comparisons, but to my ears it sounds like a very focused attempt at a Nilsson song.

i hear both pretty strongly. with a little bach, maybe, thrown in on the instrumental break. i think it's a good, overt attempt at a genre song, a concept he'd take into high gear on his next album with much more fun genres. the lyric is a detail or two short of saying anything but it does set up a mood pretty nicely.

yeah that melody is total Nilsson, although it is not a particularly great Nilsson-esque melody.

Surprises was inspired by Joel's motorcycle accident and his collapsing marriage.

Going just by the song's lyrics, it's difficult to tell that it was inspired by anything in particular at all. Just a vague feeling of an ending, with some duff rhymes for filler.

"surprises" is good imo

richie played the national anthem before the yankees-astros alcs game tonight:

https://www.mlb.com/video/cannata-plays-national-anthem/c-1863754583

based on my admittedly not thorough google research, the yankees are undefeated when billy or any member of his band does the national anthem: billy at game 1 of the 2000 world series. mark rivera at a yankees-red sox game in april 2014. and richie tonight.

thing is, billy claims to be a mets fan, and he has not exactly been a good-luck charm for them. in that 2000 world series opener, the yankees beat his mets. he was also on vocals for the mets' loss to the red sox in game 2 of the 1986 world series. they finally won with him in the lineup in game 3 of the 2015 world series.

so 3-0 with the yankees and 1-2 with the mets by my unofficial count.

username checks out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5g75rHKecM

Scandinavian Skies, penultimate track and slightly psych-tinged epic, was inspired in part by Billy's bad experience trying heroin - or possibly acid - on a flight from Amsterdam to Stockholm. Not released as a single, it apparently enjoyed some minor AOR airplay.

why the fuck would you decide a good time to try either of those things was before getting on a flight?

i like surprises a lot

"surprises" and "scandianavian skies" are almost an alt universe billy imo; i mean in this universe he mostly worships and simulates the beatles instead of following that impulse into its own strange curves and digressions

anyway i think they're both great

I already didn't like "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."

why the fuck would you decide a good time to try either of those things was before getting on a flight?

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:23 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like surprises a lot

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:25 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thought you were answering your own question there for a sec.

Listening to this now instead of as a 9-year-old kid: Oh. This isn't a WWII song after all.

this song is okayish I think. too long, and not super hookful, but at least it's different. the queasy seasick strings make me think of nilsson again but i assume they were going for i am the walrus.... and certainly the (awful) effect on billy's vocal brings out a reedy lennon-ness.

Another adult observation: So I guess these cheesy lighting effects weren't really happening inside Nassau Coliseum after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Cb3-c2REg&feature=youtu.be&t=50s

https://youtu.be/b7Cb3-c2REg?t=50s

this song is okayish I think. too long, and not super hookful, but at least it's different

that's sort of where i'm at. also it's nice for side two of a billy joel record feel like it's building toward something, instead of running out of ideas (even though it's probably still running out of ideas)

devitto is fuckin killing it in that live video

What I didn't expect to learn after reaching this point in the tread: Hall & Oates made excellent albums with wonderful album tracks from 1980-1984. I thought Joel would be at least as good.

whoops

at least the next album is full of bangers

Alfred otm this guy is a singles artist through and through

definitely

i don't think it's that he's strictly a singles artist (glass houses has plenty of good non-singles), i think it's more that he just never had a lot of material. he wasn't an album tracks artist, per se, simply because he didn't produce a whole lot of tracks.

i thought this from upthread was otm:

though I have to say, like everyone been listening to a lot of Tom Petty lately and the graceful, easy way his best songs have does make me like Billy's try-hard piano lesson kid I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow yr house down thing a little less

hall & oates, like petty, strike me as the kind of artists for whom writing songs was like breathing. an essential part of who they were and what they did. all the time. the gracefulness almost built into the process. whereas billy struggled for nearly every one. i can't imagine he had a whole lot of tracks to choose from for any given album. there are some good singles, some good non-singles, some bad singles, some bad non-singles, but not a whole lot of leftovers and lost moments.

which, i don't know, is maybe just a different way of saying he's pretty much a singles artist through and through, with a handful of great non-singles.

Also, Daryl Hall is one of hth great white R&B voices ever, so even when the songs were negligible he had the voice.

truth

Yeah, as I've said before, a Billy who made half as many albums (with twice as many hits each) would not be Billy.

And he would likely not have been a viable recording artist in this period of music history. So he is what he is.

Would be interesting to know if he or anyone at the label thought "Surprises" could be a hit, or if it's more a songwriting exercise. That one and "Zanzibar" both are almost proggy in their ambitious changes.

I was looking forward to this one, and listening for what must be the first time in 30 years I realise maybe I like this more than the rest of the album, tho Laura and Saigon are on par. I’m a little stunned at how blatant the Waltus pastiche is - he must have wanted to respond to Lennon’s death I guess. But yeah this is slinky and queasy and cryptic and menacing, I remember trying to decode it as a kid and feeling there was a lot I didn’t get.

Argh, Walrus