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

The knockkneed rhythm and Joel's barking shouldn't work but they do, like hell. This is the post-1983 single I hear most on the radio.

Whenever he plays it live, he straps on a guitar too.

I've gotten to like it a bit in the past few years, having not really grown up with it. It's super stiff but I don't hate this particular form of dad-rock... I just wish it was maybe 1:30 shorter. It's got a lot of lyrics and a lot of them wash by... I wonder, if someone had put their foot down and said, you have to cut two stanzas from this, what would he have picked?

I forget about this song's existence sometimes, but it's one of his absolute best. The melody is so strong that I think Phil Ramone and the band are just trying not to step on it - very basic arrangement, but it works. The rhythms of the lines are really memorable, and there's a couple little moments that I love: the understated guitar line during the B-section and the sung count-off

not sure if it was intentional but I always the video as a play on the Beatles rooftop concert. knowing Joel, it is

unfortunately i will now think of it whenever i play rilo kiley’s “silver lining”

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Wednesday, November 8, 2017 8:10 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Holy crap, I never made this connection before. Nice!

I love the beginning of the video -- "First two chords are open fifth, second two chords are open fifth." ROCK AND ROLL!!!!

The rhythmic stiffness dovetails with the lyric: he's steady, dependable, count on me, girl.

Feel like if you kept the stiff rhythm and just fiddled the sliders on Ramone's recording deck you might arrive at something like an "Addicted to Love" prototype.

In my top three. Possibly my favorite rocker. The bridge (npi) is very satisfying.

"I know you have doubts, but for god's sake don't shut me out" is thematically linked with the previous song's similar pleas ("stay with me baby, I've got plans for you" / "you've given me the best of you, but now I need the rest of you").

We're a long way from "I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life." Makes sense thematically as well as with where Bill himself is personally at this time - settled family life, new baby, not wanting to tour.

Whoa at Addicted to Love. I mean, it would've made more sense to hear Palmer do this one than New Day Rising.

Wish I could find the post from sunny successor where she recalls this song coming on the radio at a red light while her mom was taking her somewhere.

SS sings along with the intro ONE - TWO, uh-ONE TWO THREE FOUR.

And on FOUR, her mom just takes off across the intersection, red light be damned.

Also, the font position on that 45 sleeve is messing with me a bit.

https://i.imgur.com/Vp116iO.jpg

There's this unreleased Wilco song that always makes me think, "What song does this sound like?"

Until I hear "Matter of Trust" later and go, "Wait, someone else did a song that sounds like this."

HUWUNN
TWOOOO
HWUN TWOO THREEE FAWW

Wish someone would dub that onto the beginning of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swwjTfdOjo4

Best countdown intro ever.

like most great Billy songs my inclination to think I should dislike it is overwhelmed by its sheer gusto

i really like the guitar tones on this

the lyrics juxtaposed with christie brinkley and the baby's cameo is kinda sad in retrospect

love the video's Ferris Bueller multiculturalism, something that will never die in the hearts of the hacks of Hollywood, seen as recently as the ill-fated Kardashian Pepsi commerical

love!!!!!!!!!!

all the swagger and confidence of an innocent man without the retro trappings. if any number of the bands he was paying homage to on that album tried to make a mid-'80s comeback, this is pretty much the exact song i'd want them to do it with.

agree w/doctor c that it's a little too long. but that swagger carries me through. i get what you're all saying about the stiffness, but there's also an ease of performance here that i think makes this one of billy's sexiest songs. i sometimes wonder what someone like tom petty could have done with this.

such a bizarre feeling to have a Billy Joel song stuck in my head that i DON'T know all the words to. my brain just keeps banging a few distinctive phrases together with filler miscellaney. some women wanna buy you a soul, it's all a racket in the ultimate state of control.... AND FOR GOD'S SAKE DON'T SHUT ME OUT!

Some love is just a lie of the spleen, the cold remains of what began with a passionate bean...

now it's turning into perry/loggins "Don't Fight It." Some love is just a-hearing a groove, they're shaking heads because they still aren't able to move / But that won't happen to us, 'cause it's always been a matter of trust...

btw not really clear, how is it being a matter of trust an answer to anything else in the song? trust is like faith, right? all you can really say is, i'm trusting that this bad fate won't befall our relationship. but that can't be a reason WHY they won't happen. or is the relationship itself "a matter of trust"? so because they have such good trust levels the spark will never go out? i dunno this seems like a classic billy conceptual non-sequitur to me, two things that kinda seem like they go together but don't really add up to an argument. works while you're hearing it though.

"now i can't offer you proof / but you're gonna face a moment of truth" makes him sound like kyle reese.

some love is just alive in the knees
a soap impression of his wife who up and made him eat bees
but that won't happen to me
cause i'm ready at the shake of the keys

or is the relationship itself "a matter of trust"? so because they have such good trust levels the spark will never go out?

i think that's basically it. i like this lyric. there are a few lines along the way that don't quite add up, but yeah, he's saying we'll get through our doubts as long as you trust me and i trust you. right?

This is one of those cases where no one remembers the host album but everyone remembers "A Matter of Trust."

sam shepard's last great play, "a lie of the mind," opened off-broadway seven months before the bridge came out. it features a horrific act of domestic violence and it "may be its author's most romantic play," frank rich wrote in his nytimes review.

I mean, even people that trust each other can find the flame fades after a while. Although I guess, the trust will help them develop a relationship not dependent on that.... I dunno, feel like some of the anxieties and overconfidences of a still-youngish relationship are on display here. Doesn't ruin the song for me - I had similar "huh?" feelings with "My Life," a song I love - just along with the excess of stanzas it makes it feel a little unfocused.

TBF, I don't even remember the name of the song from a few days ago that finished off GHI&II.

I remember Billy jumping through that portal in slo-mo.

WHADDANIGHTASTEELYUHHHHHHHH

feel like some of the anxieties and overconfidences of a still-youngish relationship are on display here.

otm

no one remembers the host album

i'm not sure cyndi lauper remembers the host album

im sure your a werewolf
we both have a sherrif
bees live with two lungs
when the hole that you’re itching was wrong

This schlock was on the alarm radio every time I woke up during this time. Particularly annoying aspects of the song include the countdown mentioned above, the forced sibilence of “you can’t go the distanccccce with too much resistanccccce” and the overly earnest pleading “for god sake don’t shut me out” which has no place in a pop song. Don’t go away mad Billy, just go away.

the overly earnest pleading “for god sake don’t shut me out” which has no place in a pop song.

it doesn't?

Ain't too proud to plead, baby baby, please don't leave me, don't you go.

i like it. keeps making me think of "back to the lake" by GBV though.

for god's sake, don't shut earnestness out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDjFI3kbxuo

Modern Woman, the album's lead single, peaked at #10 (#7 Adult contemporary) with some Top 40 performance elsewhere. It was also featured in the Midler/DeVito/ZAZ comedy Ruthless People; if you want a bit of the spirit of that, this fan-video combines a teeny bit of footage from the movie with "live in the studio" footage from the promotional featurette Building the Bridge and wackily sped-up clips from the "Matter of Trust" video. Reportedly disliked by Joel, it was not featured on Greatest Hits III and thus not anthologized until the My Lives box set.

I've never heard it until now and it's... kinda neat!

Really? It stinks. The synth set my teeth on edge as much as the condescension.

This sounds like everything that is generally hated about big 80s big pop/rock production: shrill, ugly and impersonal.

Haha maybe I'm hearing it as something funkier and weirder than it is because it seems like such a left turn from Billy. When it started up in my headphones I was like "is he trying to do a Was (Not Was) song??"

wow this is some terrible shit, like Police Academy 3: Back in Training soundtrack garbage, though it's good to hear this stuff as an antidote to 80s nostalgia, because this was what a lot of the shit actually was, dudes with terrible glasses jumping around behind Yamaha keyboards wearing knockoff Sonny Crockett clothes.... probably the my least favorite song so far

I know we're not there yet, but like I did eight albums ago, I'm calling foreshadowing:

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

For a taste of how execrable mid '80s soundtracks could be, check out Mick Jagger's collaboration with Daryl Hall (!) and David Stewart for the same movie. It was supposed to be the hit (it wasn't).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cohCR3rUh0

one of those times where weird al's parody instincts and read on the charts of the original song seem to have failed him

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

Rock and roll just used to be for kicks / And nowadays it's politics / And after 1986 what else could be new

the lyric, i mean... he's trying to extend his givin'-advice schtick but obviously his feminism is incompletely formed and the woman is seen entirely as Other whose significance is as a quest object for the rather hopeless-sounding protag. taken out of context, this is kind of otm tho as a description of masculine insecurity in the face of a woman who doesn't require him or his jumbled readings of her appearance ("the quiet type who's into heavy metal"??):

You want to make a move
But you feel so inferior
Cause under that exterior
Is someone who's free

The Heat Is Not Quite On

actually, this does sound like he's aping Howard Jones.

I'm almost willing to concede he went for a little Steely Dan tone on the bridge @ 1:55

Didn't work out the same.

i like that little sax break @1:55. and then when the piano comes back in, alone, for two bars i think maybe he's about to break into "on broadway" or something. i haven't seen "ruthless people" in a long time but i remember quite enjoying it. i bet they paid a good amount of cash for this sync. this may be the most '80s thing ever. not quite as terrible as i remembered it. but pretty close.

I can't find the video, but I distinctly remember this song playing over the Moonlighting episode where Maddie Hayes gets into an elevator wearing her neon-colored Reebok hightops.

True story: as a kid, Billy Joel and Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis used to remind me greatly of each other. I'm pretty sure Die Hard is what put an end to that.

Man, if Billy had starred in Die Hard...