Tag Archives: Billy Joel

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Song of the Day #925: ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant’ – Billy Joel

My family and I play this game where we line up movies, songs or musicians into a college hoops-style bracket (OK, I line up the brackets) and vote on a series of matchups until you narrow things down to a final face-off.

So a Steven Spielberg game might see Jaws up against Always in an early round (an easy pick for most people, I imagine) then advancing to face Schindler’s List in round two (maybe not as easy a pick, though I’d still go with Jaws).

We played this game using Billy Joel songs once and after a drawn-out battle, our final two were both tracks from Joel’s classic 1977 album The Stranger — ‘Vienna’ and ‘Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.’

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Song of the Day #327: ‘Lullaby (Goodnight My Angel)’ – Billy Joel

riverofdreamsLooking at the numbers makes Billy Joel’s “retirement” all the more impressive. He truly went out at the top of his game, with River of Dreams selling more than 5 million copies and vying for an Album of the Year Grammy. To just hang it up after a success like that takes some guts.

When this album came out (in 1993), Alex and I went to the store and each bought a copy of the CD. This was in the days before iPods and easy CD burning, and several years before we’d get married and merge our CD collections. It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 years since I last purchased a Billy Joel album.

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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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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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