It all comes back to the whistling. That plaintive but sensual whistled melody that opens the title track of Billy Joel’s The Stranger and then returns as the coda after the album’s final song. It settles you into the world of this marvelous record and prepares you for the treasures within.
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.’
In the words of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, “This is it. This is the one they’ll remember me for.” Of course he was talking about a porn film, but I imagine Billy Joel feels the same way about his 1977 classic The Stranger.
The album contains only nine songs but just about every one is a classic. The first seven are undeniably so: ‘Movin’ Out,’ ‘The Stranger,’ ‘Just the Way You Are,’ ‘Scenes From and Italian Restaurant,’ Vienna,’ ‘Only the Good Die Young’ and ‘She’s Always a Woman.’ But the less ubiquitous final two tracks — ‘Get it Right the First Time’ and ‘Everybody Has a Dream’ — are just as strong.
Meet Me In Montauk 