Tag Archives: Billy Joel

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Song of the Day #1,144: ‘Summer, Highland Falls’ – Billy Joel

Best Songwriters – #10 – Billy Joel

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a comment saying that I don’t consider Brad Paisley or Taylor Swift among my “top tier” of songwriters. So of course the question that immediately jumped into my mind was, “Who is in my top tier of songwriters?”

The next two weeks will be dedicated to answering that question.

First, a few ground rules.

I’m restricting this list to solo artists. No Lennon/McCartney or Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe band collaborations here. No Counting Crows, Belle & Sebastian or The Smiths.

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Song of the Day #962: ‘The Stranger’ – Billy Joel

Over the next four weeks I’m going to feature songs from 20 of my very favorite albums. I consider all of these albums essentially perfect — no bad songs, nothing skip-worthy, a consistent excellence from start to finish.

Plenty of my favorite artists have failed to craft an album worthy of this list. You won’t see anything by R.E.M., The Beatles or Belle and Sebastian in this series, for example. It’s not that they haven’t released albums I find meaningful or even transcendent — they absolutely have — but some of those albums feature a song or two that pale in comparison to their surroundings.

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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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