Billy Joel

Billy Joel

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Essential Albums

  • An Innocent Man
    An Innocent Man
    An Innocent Man

    1983

  • Glass Houses
    Glass Houses
    Glass Houses

    Billy Joel is a restless person who loves a broad range of music, and enjoys exploring different styles—possibly because “Piano Man” and “Just the Way You Are” got him pigeonholed as a balladeer. Glass Houses is one of his most unpredictable musical twists, and it takes a turn towards New Wave, especially the efficient rock songs of The Cars. Compare “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” (Joel’s first No. 1 hit) and “You May Be Right” with “Just What I Needed” and “Let’s Go”, and you might notice similar rhythm-guitar intros. In the deliberately provocative “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”, Joel takes a look at the “new sounds” in vogue (punk and New Wave) and concludes, with a Boomer-ish shrug, that it’s nothing new. Most of it, he told interviewers, reminded him of the garage rock he grew up loving, like The Seeds, or ? and the Mysterians. It’s a bit condescending, but by incorporating New Wave into the album, he expressed an appreciation alongside the scepticism. There are also songs that would fit easily on his earlier records. The pensive ballad “Through the Long Night” describes the looming end of his first marriage. The cosmopolitan “Don’t Ask Me Why” features a rare solo from Joel, inspired by his affection for the Spanish pianist José Iturbi, who starred in 1940s movies like Anchors Aweigh. Then there’s “C’etait Toi (You Were the One)”, which was influenced by French chanson and was used to great effect in the NBC cult comedy Freaks and Geeks, yet remains one of Joel’s least favourite songs. (“The song really sucks”, he once said.) Overall, Glass Houses has the exuberance of Elvis Costello’s or Joe Jackson’s early work. Joel had been headlining arenas since The Stranger, and he wanted guitar-based songs that would rouse an arena of 18,000 people. It shows.

  • 52nd Street
    52nd Street
    52nd Street

    Billy Joel’s previous album, The Stranger, sold 10 million copies, won two Grammys and made him, after a decade of struggle, a household name. The successor, 52nd Street, added another Top 5 single (the ornery “My Life”), two more Grammys and sold a still-enviable seven million copies, establishing Joel as a major star in the pop sweepstakes. It’s also his best-reviewed album (critics haven’t always loved Joel, nor has he always loved them) thanks largely to the confident way he traverses styles of music and different emotions. In “Big Shot”, one of his hardest-rocking songs, Joel mocks a trendy, affluent New Yorker who does coke in the back of his limousine; he later admitted that it was partly about the ways in which he overindulged in his new-found stardom. “Honesty”, one of his most enduring ballads, pleads for truthfulness from a lover. “Zanzibar” describes life inside a small jazz club and includes two vibrant solos from the esteemed trumpet player Freddie Hubbard; there’s an agile bounce and jazzy interlude to “Stiletto”, a bitter song about romantic masochism; and “Rosalinda’s Eyes” moves into a Latin-influenced groove and adds vibraphone, flute, marimba and session ace Hugh McCracken’s nylon-string guitar. The giddy urban tale “Half a Mile Away” is driven by a horn chart written by the accomplished pianist Dave Grusin, and “Until the Night”, a sweeping, yearning ballad, points towards An Innocent Man, the ’50s- and ’60s-influenced album Joel released in 1983. If you were to change the opinion of a sceptic who thinks Joel is “Just the Way You Are” and not much more, this would be the record to play—struggle, joy and the balance in between. Your attempt would most likely fail, though: No Billy Joel hater can be swayed, nor can any Billy Joel lover, and there’s very little room in the middle for opinions about his brassy, emphatic pop songs.

  • The Stranger
    The Stranger
    The Stranger

    Sometimes, overnight success takes a decade to happen. Billy Joel had been recording for that long, in bands and as a solo artist, when he released his fifth solo album. Prior to The Stranger, he’d had one song in the Top 30 of the charts, “Piano Man”. A year later, he had a total of five. Joel had approached The Beatles’ legendary producer George Martin, who agreed to make the album if Joel would use a studio band. But he was determined to use his touring band, so in a massively audacious move, he rejected Martin. Instead, he began a long and fruitful relationship with Phil Ramone, who’d recently produced hits for Paul Simon. In addition to the sheen Ramone brought with him, Joel wrote his best batch of songs to date. “Just the Way You Are” became a pop standard, thanks in part to a dulcet alto sax solo from jazz man Phil Woods, and got him pegged as a balladeer, much to his dismay. But aside from the song’s swaying and enduring beauty, it’s the least interesting song here. The Stranger is a bravura set of rock songs filtered through Joel’s broad, inclusive love of non-rock formats, including Latin rhythms, gospel melodies and brassy Tin Pan Alley songs. There is also a Broadway sweep to the episodic hit “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”, which taught the whole country that on Long Island, the name Brenda is pronounced “Brender”. Drama suffuses the album, including the film-noir whistling that sets up the title song, and the narratives of “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”, in which a young man rejects the traps of materialism and hard labour, and “Only the Good Die Young”, where a virgin Catholic girl is wooed by a street tough who could use better come-ons than “I might as well be the one”. It’s a very New York album, from its stylistic diversity and urbane tone to lyrics that mention Sullivan Street, the Village Green and the Parkway Diner. But Joel later said his favourite song on the album, and one of his career favourites, is “Vienna”, an earnest, fatherly meditation on adolescence that opens with a Kurt Weill-styled beer hall piano melody and then adds a string part orchestrated by Pulitzer Prize-nominated arranger Patrick Williams, and an accordion passage that’s like something you might hear walking on the banks of the Danube River.

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About Billy Joel

Broad, earnest and unreservedly sentimental, Billy Joel remains the quintessential showman of pop music. Born in 1949 in New York City and raised on Long Island during the postwar boom era, Joel spent his early career in Los Angeles, working briefly as the singer in a bar on Wilshire Boulevard—an experience commemorated in his signature song, “Piano Man”. He went on to become one of the most successful artists in pop, bridging reflective singer-songwriter material (1982’s The Nylon Curtain) with sock-hop nostalgia like “The Longest Time” and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” for a theatrical, particularly American sound whose resonances can be heard not only in piano balladeers but in pop omnivores like Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga. In the ’90s, Joel shifted his energy to touring; he sold out stadiums and arenas around the world well into the 21st century and helmed a 150-show run at New York’s Madison Square Garden until the summer of 2024. Joel has an air of the everyman about him, the megastar somehow intimately in touch with the aspirations and disappointments of ordinary people. Songs like the 1977 mini-epic “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” and 1976’s ruminative “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” paired anthemic choruses with a wistfulness about lost pasts; biting tracks like 1978’s socialite satire “Big Shot” and 1971’s scathing “Everybody Loves You Now” put his New York-honed attitude on display; and cuts like the muscular “A Matter of Trust” and the loping “She’s Always a Woman” show off his romantic side. His combination of sincerity and musical chops—leavened by a withering humour—have made his catalogue a pop touchstone.

BORN
1949
GENRE
Rock

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