Monthly Archives: June 2009

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The Hangover

hangoverI like the idea of The Hangover a bit more than I liked the actual movie.

I love that a low-budget anarchic comedy starring three schlubby second-tier actors outperformed the new Terminator film on its opening weekend. I love that great word of mouth and the buzz of something unexpected and hilarious can overcome blockbuster inertia and surprise everyone.

It’s the same formula that made Wedding Crashers a $210 million sensation a few years back, nestled on the box office top ten between the more predictable King Kong and Batman Begins.

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Song of the Day #323: ‘Big Man on Mulberry Street’ – Billy Joel

thebridge1986’s The Bridge was Billy Joel’s last great album and my fifth favorite of his albums (I’ll let you guess the other four). It contains only nine songs but they’re uniformly strong. The one minor exception is the rather maudlin ‘This is the Time,’ which probably wasn’t written for a high school prom but may as well have been.

The album features a few high-profile collaborations, including a wonderful duet with Ray Charles on ‘Baby Grand.’ I remember when I first heard that song I remarked that Joel sounded like Ray Charles on the first verse and was shocked when the actual Ray Charles jumped in on the second.

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Bob Dylan – Together Through Life

togetherthroughlifeMy recent post about the new video for Bob Dylan’s ‘Beyond Here Lies Nothing’ reminded me that I’ve been putting off my review of the album on which that song appears, Together Through Life.

It’s hard to believe that, at 68 years old, Bob Dylan is in the middle of a streak that rivals his output in the mid 1960s. From 1965-67, he released Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding. That streak would be a career for most artists.

It took him a little longer this time, but from 1997 through this year, he has released Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times and now Together Through Life — another streak that other artists must envy.

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Song of the Day #322: ‘Leave a Tender Moment Alone’ – Billy Joel

innocentmanJoel followed up Nylon Curtain with one of his best-selling albums, the 50s flavored An Innocent Man. This is one of his slightest albums, most likely by design. The doo-wop ear candy of ‘The Longest Time’ and the cornball ‘Uptown Girl’ are about an inch deep, inspired by similar songs Joel loved as a kid.

But the album contains a few more meaningful gems, including the nostalgic ‘Keeping the Faith,’ the Beethoven-sampling ‘This Night’ and the excellent title tune. Joel was in fine voice on this album, as evidenced by the fact that he could actually hit the notes in the chorus of ‘An Innocent Man,’ a task he had to delegate to a backup singer on later tours.

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Song of the Day #321: ‘Laura’ – Billy Joel

nyloncurtainThe Nylon Curtain is one of Billy Joel’s most ambitious albums, and one of his best. Two years after the major success of the expectation-defying Glass Houses, Joel changed things up again, paying more attention than ever to the production values of his work and crafting an homage to his childhood heroes The Beatles.

Nylon Curtain was a bit of a slump, sales-wise, selling “only” 2 million copies in the U.S. One of the real surprises for me in researching these songs for the Billy Joel theme is exactly how commercially successful he remained throughout his career. With the exception of the ill-fated Cold Spring Harbor, every single one of Joel’s albums has gone platinum. Of the eleven post-Harbor albums, all but two have gone at least four times platinum. Artists today would kill for that sort of consistency. (It’s weird to talk about Joel’s recording career in the past tense, but it’s been 16 years since he last put out an album!)

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