Billy Joel C/D?

Hey, 誤訳侮辱, let me know when you want to go on a really long road trip with me.

That said, "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" could be the worst possible song to pick as Your Wedding Song.

i was thinking the same thing

That said, "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" could be the worst possible song to pick as Your Wedding Song.

I had an ex whose parents' wedding first-dance was soundtracked by Freda Payne's Band Of Gold. I think that's worse (if a better song).

I once attended a wedding where the first dance was Who's Sorry Now by Connie Francis.

^^^ winner

Sunny flirted with the idea of walking down the aisle to "Stuck In the Middle With You"

Jokers to the left of me looks at her family,
Jokers to the right, looks at my family...

haha, splendid candidate

lool sunny <3

I've come around on Billy Joel. His tunes are infinitely catchy and the lyrics aren't as vapid as I remember (Uptown Girl, et al excluded). A lot of his stuff touches on real shit like manic-depression, class consciousness, and the death of the American dream. And some of it is pointless but well-produced AOR... listening to his live stuff demonstrates he's also pretty good on the keys, which I can appreciate.

I'm not sure where to put him in my own brain's classification... I feel like I want to compare him to Warren Zevon, although the internet seems to be telling me he's the American Elton John. I don't think Elton's songs are as personal and autobiographical as Billy's...

The early posts on this thread seem pretty extreme. Is he a terrible person IRL or something?

warren zevon isn't a bad comparison. elton john is the obv one ppl go for but i don't think it really hold up beyond the immediate obv similarities, elton's doesn't have nearly the bitterness. the best comparison i've read, the one that haunts me, and it was on ilm was that he's the american elvis costello.

Is he a terrible person IRL or something?

Yeah, probably. I don't think the degree to which songs are autobiographical determine quality.

best comparison i've read, the one that haunts me, and it was on ilm was that he's the american elvis costello

that would be the first post of this thread.

I haunt your balls

i, too, am not sure what autobiography has to do with anyone mentioned here. billy and elton both strike me as preternaturally talented pianists and composers who use words mostly as a way to express their melodies. elton grabs his words from outsider writers, while billy writes his own so, yeah, sure, he probably can't help it with the bitterness and self-loathing, since that's who he is. but that doesn't automatically make the songs autobiographical. maybe the melodies are autobiographical though.

as for zevon, maybe he's what billy would be like if billy read more. he's certainly a match for billy in the bitterness and self-loathing departments.

I've slowly gotten stoned idk

I love Zevon more than Elton and Billy Joel so

xps Alfred I wasn't saying that autobiographical songs are better/more important or whatever, I was just using that as a yardstick for comparison to other musicians (like Elton John) w/r/t similar themes present in the respective artist's catalog.

I don't know enough Costello to know if that's an apt comparison. Anyway, my argument isn't that BJ's music is amazing, just that it's more interesting than I had previously thought.

But yeah its otm that Zevon is better than BJ & Eton.

and I love plenty of Elton songs

Wasn't John Hiatt briefly the American EC?

Billy basically Bruce-lite, with Warren's knack for melody plus both the aforementioned's propensity for defensible cheese and bombast, minus the defense. And yeah, fewer books read than either, too.

Also, Warren not afraid to flash a knife in your face now and then, figuratively speaking.

Is he a terrible person IRL or something?

I've wondered this too. Like, is there any definitive "Billy Joel is an asshole" story or two that proves that he is considerably worse than any number of people we regularly celebrate on this board, or just an overall feeling that people have?

man the more i try to compare billy joel to other artists, the more i'm actually impressed by him. he's firmly in the tradition of the great american songbook but also firmly in the tradition of the post-dylan singer-songwriter. Everyone else seems kind of indulgent or arch in comparison.

Profile last year:

“The set’s a little M.O.R.,” Joel complained, meaning “middle of the road,” the soft-rock category now called Adult Contemporary. He made his way onto the stage and sat down at the piano and knocked out a little Beethoven, before the band members, most of whom have been with him for more than ten years, worked out the backup vocal harmonies to “My Life.” They vamped for a while on “Sledgehammer,” by Peter Gabriel, and ran through the end of “Movin’ Out,” to get the right level for the horns. And then Joel was doing “Just the Way You Are.” He’d written it for his first wife and manager, Elizabeth. When he told her, “This song is for you,” Donna Summer, standing nearby, said, “Does that come with the publishing?”

Before long, at the sound check, he began substituting bawdy lyrics: “I just want someone . . . to have sex with” and “Now you know I’m . . . full of shi-it.” “I couldn’t have loved you any better, unless . . . you grew some bigger tits.” Cohen walked by, shaking his head.

After a while, Joel stopped. “Should we really do that one? Really?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/27/thirty-three-hit-wonder

realized this on twitter recently but the time between river of dreams and now is more than the time between cold spring harbor and river of dreams.

according to the profile, he makes up for that time by drawing boats and getting lost w/Bono in Long Island.

yeah i have to say i do weirdly respect him for hanging it up and not releasing any new albums even though he could easily crank out whatever and have it sell well

elton's duets came out after river of dreams

I was going to compare Storm Front to Steel Wheels because they came out the same year except Joel outsold the Stones easily, i.e. he wasn't (yet) a nostalgia act.

neil young has released more albums since river of dreams than billy joel ever released

(and billy can STILL outdraw the fucker!)

I don't know if BJ is a bad person but he does often seem to be really arrogant, smug ... a dick, basically. Plus or minus the effect of booze. Could be the accent at work? But absolutely, there are far worse people in the biz (Warren Zevon was one of them).

Basically my gut reaction to Billy Joel is not unlike my reaction to the Eagles, a talented bunch of similarly overplayed bros who more or less wrote what was expected of them, nothing more, nothing less, stay on target, never stray, count the money. I think his jaundiced self-loathing definitely hampers/hurts him, especially now, just as it hurts the Eagles; if he had the (real or fake) humility of, say, talented MOR tunesmith Neil Diamond, he'd be a lot easier to take. But then you see stuff like this, and you're like, eh, OK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bceuh8c-4kg

i don't think you can really say "his jaundiced self-loathing definitely hampers/hurts him" AND that he "more or less wrote what was expected of them, nothing more, nothing less, stay on target, never stray, count the money". even more so than the eagles, the former, while a noxious personality trait, IS a personality trait that separates him from a lot of singer-songwriters who really never did have an identity beyond a hit song or three.

like, richard marx, he's a guy who stayed in his lane

(with all due respect to "hazard" and his twitter)

I meant that unlike the Eagles, who wrote some resolutely MOR shit but did so from a place of misplaced superiority - we are the Eagles, we are awesome, therefore we are great and you suck - BJ seems to carry himself like he knows many of his hits are crap. Like, he's always had this tough guy, working class swagger, and I wonder if he at all feels his career has been one long compromised sell-out. Like, he did what he was told because he could and it paid off, but maybe he doesn't value what he does because he secretly (or overtly, as of late) aspired to Mozart? Whereas the Eagles would be all, fuck Mozart, how much did he sell?

xxxpost i was hoping it'd end with Billy sitting down at the piano and going "yeah but can you do THIS?"

Josh, you're implying that Joel can be anything other than a jukebox. He wrote "Piano Man" cuz he's a piano man -- that's what he is.

i just don't think you can hold onto the idea that these guys were just dully following the rules AND blowing themselves on wax. there are too many examples of people truly doing the former for me to think billy or the eagles really were.

these guys weren't just going down the middle of the road, they were repaving it in their image

Tell it to Atilla.

I think someone like solo artist Richard Marx is an outlier, because his roots are as a session guy and songwriter and that's essentially where he ended up again. Like if Desmond Child's shit-ass Rouge had somehow hit it big, it would have been the same. His heart and skills (as such) lay behind the scenes.

Speaking of which, this is like if ABBA and Eddie Money had an ugly baby:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLcWHU9tKjg

Play me a song, I'm the piano man, man:

http://i0.wp.com/www.metalinjection.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/attila.jpg?fit=750,1000

I think its pretty obv that the guy selling out stadiums more than 20 years after his last album is the outlier more than the hack who hit it rich for a couple years

(Btw nobody tell Richard I called him a hack its just shorthand I mean him no ill)

shit, croup, you just sealed your death sentence unless you can persuade Richard to meet you at a sports bar

That IS the death sentence

Richard's still having hits, for other people! Say too many bad things about him and he'll have Keith Urban hold your arms while he punches you.

wtf are we arguing about

"He's still getting checks behind the scenes in Nashville" soooo not making Richard more novel than billy in terms of MOR singer-songwriters

Oh I'm just pointing out the inconsistencies in rockist logic, quixotic i know

To be clear I'm not saying billy joel doesn't suck, I just like ideological clarity

you can't go the distance with too much resistance