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

Here, feel free to add this one back to the Hits.

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Following a major tour in 1984 and Joel's marriage to Christie Brinkley, Billy recorded his tenth studio album, The Bridge, at various studios between 1985 and 1986. (Alexa Ray Joel was born in December of '85.) It was released July 28 of the latter year, as the final album to bear the Family Productions logo - god, what a crappy contract provision that was. Supported by another big tour, the record underperformed An Innocent Man while still doing very well, peaking at #7 on the Billboard album charts and producing three top-forty hits with two making it to #10. In the US it was the year's fiftieth best-selling album and has been certified double-platinum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wk0r8CeiKc

Running on Ice opens the album with a nervous, jumpy pastiche of a certain popular act, then recently defunct. The stoop-leaning doo-wop artists have been left far behind - couldn't go back to the greasers, I guess.

One of the catchier Police pastiches, yes, and three years too late. Not terrible, though.

Don't know what you're trying to insinuate there, DC.

https://i.imgur.com/47y63lo.jpg

I think I prefer Weird Al's "Velvet Elvis," but that's after a different aspect of their sound. The later, colder, jitterier sound heard here is more rarely imitated. I like how he even gets the tendency for Sting's choruses to repeat the title of the song as much as humanly possible.

and wau @ pplains link. good idea. we should do an ILM covers project imo.

The Bridge, which I got on vinyl in July at a college radio station giveaway, sounds like contract fulfillment: no unifying style or purpose. You have standard 1986 rockers, a Cyndi Lauper appearance, a Ray Charles duet for fans besotted with An Innocent Man, the obligatory ballad.

I'm still hopeful of finding some gems, but it has to be admitted that the Sirius XM chatter for this one launches almost immediately into:

I was at the point where I was kind of tired of the process of recording - - writing, recording, touring, writing, recording, touring... I didn't have much of a life. And at that point I wanted to have a life, once that baby was born, I wanted to be home. And I hear in the writing on The Bridge a certain reluctance to continue. (...) There are some... not-well-written songs on there, I was in a hurry to get it over with. And that would be similar to the process that happened with Streetlife Serenade. The Bridge has some good stuff on it, but I can also see that there is weak material on that album as well that I'm not that proud of.

I dunno, "Running on Ice" has me hopeful. It's energetic. Reminds me oddly of "Travelin' Prayer" in terms of opening the record with a nice busy, uptempo rhythm. And it's definitely not something we've heard before, so even if the songwriting's not all great on this I'd be into just seeing where he goes sonically with each track.

I admit, though, that "A Matter of Trust" had left me thinking this might be his "guitar album" or something, which would have been an interesting (if possibly bad) move. Doesn't look now like that'll be the case.

Here's Billy basically saying what DC already mentioned above in regard to this record.

Two bonus items here: 1. Half-decent Cyndi Lauper imitation and 2. He might not take shit from no one, but ships on the other hand....

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

huh. hell of a pastiche but i like it!

best part: the post-chorus "you got to run run run run whoaoaaoaaa"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHC3M7KL2ns&feature=youtu.be

He's actually being kind to Cyndi, whose normal speaking voice sounds even more like a parody of itself than Billy's imitation of it.

Billy Joel imitating the Police is a nightmare scenario, a horrible oroborous of regrettable aesthetic decisions

have you heard it?

I made it through the first minute and a half

I'm trying to think of some analogous combo. the Eagles doing U2?

oh come on – it's much better

at worst this tune is innocuous. It's not an embarrassment.

you underestimate my hatred of the Police

the music "the night is still young" TOTALLY sounds like genesis in parts (the music under the chorus)

lol this first song on the bridge really is some Police worship! and not even in the 80s Rush sense where they really made it their own, it's like he's trying to sound like Sting on the verses

As if The Police recorded with Various Positions' engineer. Sounds like French or Soviet pop.

He's trying to sound like Sting, as much as he's previously tried to sound like Ray Charles and Nilsson and McCartney... not like he's trying to sneakily rip something off and have a hit, but like he's dressing in drag. I'm really buying more and more into my "Joel as the first postmodern pop star" theory. He really is most himself and most comfortable writing when he's sitting down to be somebody else.

This would not be one of my favorite Police song though, I'd admit. Giving it a few more listens, we'll see if it becomes a little headsticky.

The opening swirl of keyboards reminds me tremendously of Hall and Oates' "Head Above Water."

"Joel as the first postmodern pop star"

the first? come on now

first good one worthy of the name

bowie was capable of being david bowie. i'm unconvinced billy joel was capable of being billy joel. at the least he should get the "chameleon" credit that bowie and madonna get.

Bowie writes circles around this schmuck

(I'd probably put Dylan and Reed ahead of Bowie in the "firsties" competition fwiw)

i feel like billy is the opposite actually (imo) - he tries on genre and stylistic clothes but his inherent billy joelelocity always overtakes the proceeding

lol @ joelelocity

joelelolzcity

dylan obviously the more significant artist but his very identity as dylan - a carefully-assembled mishmash yes but a comparatively stable and very mythically built-up one - works against him here. album after album he sounds like bob dylan doing bob dylan songs. billy's billyness comes out *despite* his desire to be somebody else, and mainly in his lyrics which often seem to be the least important and conscious aspect of the songs. also in terms of sales and charts he blows dylan completely out of the water (and lou reed isn't even on the same planet, pop star wise)... there's something interesting to me about such a centerless, mutable musical brand name being up there in the top ten all-time bestselling superstar artists. for comparison, in the US at least dylan's down at 44 and bowie doesn't make the top 100.

i mean, it's a deliberate stretch and there's all kinds of problems with it so i don't mind the objections. but i feel like he's been totally misunderstood in some sense. the perception of him as a crowd-pleasing Long Island arena schmuck is far from wrong but he's also basically a pop music fan whose whole discography is cutting demos for specific other artists to cover, or something.

album after album he sounds like bob dylan doing bob dylan songs.

Figured you would say something like this, but I don't think this is accurate at all. For instance, Dylan's vocal delivery and material change dramatically over time, from the shout-y Woody Guthrie-style delivery of the first album to an extended Lefty Frizzel impression a few years later to an album of almost entirely terrible covers just a few years after that. Reed similarly goes all over the place, from aping Dylan to doo-wop to glam to experimental noise music to punk poet. Bowie is in their lineage but even more extreme in the abrupt stylistic shifts.

I will concede that all of these guys have a distinct "voice" and approach - despite all the genre exercises - that Billy doesn't ever really develop, which I think I argued upthread somewhere, although specifically in terms of his lyrics. He is much more firmly a pastiche artist, but what makes him distinctive as one is how *weak* his own voice in in comparison to these other guys (all of whom, as noted, came before him). What is distinct about him is that bitter Long Island schtick, it bleeds through every style he assumes, but there's not much there, it's flimsy and obvious, where Bowie, Reed, and Dylan all better understood mystery and ambiguity.

Like with Bowie, Reed and Dylan (and shit maybe we should throw Neil Young in here too) there's always this balance between being unpredictable and maintaining a certain personal quality. One of them might do a specific genre exercise, but it nonetheless is distinctly *them* doing it, and that tension is where the mystery and the interesting stuff is. Billy sort of disappears into his exercises, where the only real Joelian elements one can discern are usually sloppy lyrics and a certain fussiness with arrangements and rhythms. But there's no mystery there.

Joelocity II

Paul Simon is another point of comparison, writing genre songs in relatively obscure genres, but never hiding either self-awareness or intelligence.

i don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying - but again reed is not a pop star, dylan and bowie are (but not at joel's scale or level of success), and I'm not sure mystery or subjective *quality* are essential requirements of being a postmodern artist.

they aren't essential qualities, but they're why Dylan et al were better at it (and, again, first)

idk why yr disqualifying Reed as a pop star. Certainly not on the level of these other guys, but he did have hits

or rather one hit lol

but really i'm just casting about for a bolder way to say "the conventional wisdom on billy joel doesn't accurately describe what he does as a songwriter and performer." i think he's slightly more interesting than his rep. doesn't have to take anything away from these other cats.

and yes who can forget the feverish period of "loumania"... the magazine covers, the superbowl halftime shows, the cooking lessons on "good morning america"... oh and the forty-four singles of which one got to #16, two stalled just below #100 and all the rest did not chart

(for comparison to joel see the OP in this thread)

Dylan literally, at the height of his career, invented a new singing voice for himself and released Nashville Skyline

I agree with Dr. C that Joel is more interesting than he is generally given credit for.

Also that he's not in competition with Bob Dylan, sheesh. Girls, you're both pretty. He doesn't have to be credited with saving rock; he doesn't have to be disparaged as the Worst Thing Ever either.

As I have said a couple times upthread, there are a few places where I think he innovated. He arrived first at some places that other superstars hadn't got to yet. And I would certainly characterize his approach to pastiche as postmodern: winking, but also unapologetically heartfelt. His willingness to be uncool is, itself, a type of cool, and that's a pretty pomo posture.

The opening swirl of keyboards

...is a complete and crazy fakeout, promising, for seven glorious seconds, that we are about to witness the return of the angry young root beer piano man. and then, instead, boom, it's another innocent man-like genre/artist homage, except this time he's taking on someone his own age. sting is only two years younger than he is! "running on ice" is no more or less on-the-nose than anything on the previous album, and i could see it fitting in on either glass houses or nylon curtain with a few tweaks here and there. so basically, billy being billy, having fun trying on yet another face. "i'm a cosmopolitan sophisticate of culture and intelligence" sounds like he's taking the homage thing a little too far. but it also sounds exactly like something billy would say. as doctor c says above, he's really good at finding his own voice through other people's voices. he finds decent melodies that-a-way, too. thumbs up.

Busy day today, no time for Billy, so I'm listening/commenting without having read today's discussion:

The Bridge is probably, along with Cold Spring Harbor, the album of his that I had the least familiarity with going into this. I don't remember the singles having much of a radio presence (unlike "We Didn't Start the Fire," one album later), and I always assumed, from the two big singles off of this album, that the whole thing found him going all-out arena-rock. I knew that it has duets with Cyndi Lauper (which I'm curious about) and Ray Charles (which just seems like a wish fulfillment fantasy crossed with a literalization of Billy's occasional Ray impersonations throughout his career), but we'll get to those.

Anyway...

Billy does The Police does not sound like anything that I would want to hear in either theory or in practice. I'm not a Police fan, but I'm not a hater either. But this is more shrug-worthy than actively annoying.

Usually I feel some Billy comes through in the performance, if not the songwriting, but if I had first heard "Running on Ice" in the wild, I'd think it was someone else. They've done everything to copy the Police: the voice, the playing, the arrangement, the shifts between the verses and chorus - the opening piano part is the only Billy I recognize here. it's not a bad song, but pretty wild and unpolished compared to the other songs I know from the album. Seems like a very awkward transition into "This is the Time", at the least

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M443VsY4XI

This is the Time was the album's third single. Sans video, it reached #18 on the Hot 100 and #1 on Adult Contemporary. For a song I've never heard before, it apparently had a decent pop-cultural afterlife:

The song was featured on the NBA VHS NBA Superstars, in a segment showcasing Hall of Fame players from the 1950s to the 1970s.[citation needed] It was also played during Larry Bird's retirement ceremony at the Boston Garden in 1993, this time honoring past players of the Boston Celtics.[citation needed]

"This Is the Time" is the title of a 2014 season 2 episode of The Carrie Diaries in which Carrie (AnnaSophia Robb) attends her senior prom. Joel's song is referenced by character Donna LaDonna (Chloe Bridges) during her prom queen acceptance speech as the music begins to play in the background. It is mentioned twice more in conversations shortly thereafter. The Correatown cover version of the song also plays in the closing minutes of this penultimate episode.

In Italy this song was used as opening and closing theme for the soap-opera "Guiding Light" (In Italy called "Sentieri") from 1986 to 2007.[4]

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the sound design of this song is basically perfect for me. even the wave sound effect