And my second Random Weekend selection is… ‘Temptation’ from Billy Joel’s 1986 album, The Bridge.
Well, it could have been worse. It could have been ‘This is the Time.’
The Bridge is an interesting album in that it features some of Joel’s most ambitious, complex work (songs such as ‘Big Man on Mulberry Street,’ ‘Running On Ice’ and ‘Code of Silence’) but also some of his worst forays into MOR sap.
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.
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.
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.’
Meet Me In Montauk 