IT'S BETTER THAN DRINKIN' ALONE: The Official ILM Track-by-Track BILLY JOEL Listening Thread

hey sorry, burned my ILX time today arguing with Fred. please continue to enjoy "stiletto" and we'll be back later tonight, or perhaps tomorrow AM!

A perfect time to catch up, then...

My Life - There's something that's just so perfectly on brand about Billy writing the quintessential "me decade" anthem, but I've always heard a melancholy to the arrangement, delivery and a good portion of the lyric that reveals a self-awareness--there's something more going on here than just an asshole whining about the perils of adulthood. Contrast "We used to be real close" and the whole bit about sleeping with alone/with somebody else/waking up alone to the "fuck you" chorus--there's an "is this all there is?" kind of disappointment to the whole song that runs deeper than the petulance/defiance of "go ahead with your own life / leave me alone."

Zanzibar - Baseball as a metaphor for fucking, or maybe fucking as a metaphor for baseball, I dunno. Lyrically hamfisted--Billy mentions "stealing second base" in case you missed the point--and overlong as well. I briefly owned a copy of this album that I may or may not have grabbed from my aunt and uncle when they were getting rid of their old vinyls, and in my memory, the whole album kind of sounds vaguely like this--snoozy, jazzy soft-rock.

Stiletto - I admire the tight arrangement--the finger snaps, the piano arpeggios, the way the one little piano riff responds to his punchy delivery in a couple of moments--but I just ain't a fan of Billy trying to be Ray.

spoiler: in later tracks on this album you can look forward to him trying to be elton john, boz scaggs, and maybe the doobies. i like em all though. and i like your "my life" take. agreed. the "used to be real close" is quite suggestive... kinda feels like a muted followup to something like the last lines of simon and garfunkel's "america." everybody's living their own life, they want to be left alone, okay... but nobody's real close anymore. all come to look for anomieca. this kind of thing very well tees up all your boomer pity parties (the big chill, etc.).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB-tkHD4uXU

Rosalinda's Eyes carries us into the deep-cut zone of this severely front-loaded album with possibly the yachtiest number Billy ever cut.
If anyone wants to condemn it to the same bin as all the other 70s rocker "exotic island woman" numbers, I won't argue. For the record, the backstory is that Billy's mother was named "Rosalind," and in interviews he's described it as the kind of lyric he thinks his father should have sung to her, as apparently he wasn't the romantically expressive type. The Cuban business is biographical: Helmuth (later Howard) Joel was one of those who escaped Nazi Germany by way of a stay in Cuba to get past immigration quotas. I'm not really sure how long he stayed there, but I guess it's possible he developed a real affection for the place, and later identified it with his wife, who he met through musical theater.

for the record btw i think "stiletto" is great, dopey femme fatale lyric and all. i love how in the opening the sax riff feels like a translation of something like the "Stranger" whistle intro - just some wistful scene setting, and then when it comes around later with the band pounding away behind it, it's this fiery blast from richie c. all right, rico! and yeah, the groovy instrumental sections, the snaps...

i think the only thing i really get sick of is the verse. she CUTS you hard! she CUTS you deep! you've been BOUGHT! you've been SOLD! blah blah blah. as with "she's always a woman" i don't like this lyrical standpoint for joel, where he's letting you in on the intelligence he's assembled about this woman. get over yourself.

I don't wish to jump too far ahead of the story, Dr. C., but I think Glass Houses is even more front-loaded than 52nd Street, unless I'm gravely mistaken. A side of wall-to-wall hits, B side of mostly-forgotten rarities.

Almost all his albums are kinda like that, really, though yeah that one and Nylon Curtain are kinda extreme. The Stranger stands out for actually bothering to put a single on the second side; other than that, the mold isn't broken until he has an album with so many singles they won't all fit on one side. But indeed, that's getting ahead of ourselves...

the thing about glass houses is it was clearly intended to be front-loaded but he continued to write pretty good songs after he normally would have run out of them and side 2 is therefore totally not bad and has at least one certified classic.

(Man. "Zanzibar" is a relentless ear worm I've been waking up to each morning this week.)

He looks like he's about ready to kiss Fredo on the lips here

https://peopledotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/3_19_79_750x1000.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/nvXeYUu.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/YHoXW76.jpg

(Also, Rita Coolidge is blond now! But I digress...)

Anyway. Everybody would've loved this song had it originally appeared on The Nightfly.

BJ isnt fit to polish Fagen's fenders in the lyric dept

Dancing solo down in Herald Square
It's murder out in the street

Minor, but pretty.

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

Half A Mile Away finds Billy vamping it up with a tale of a simple man's getaway from everyday troubles. I believe we're meant to hear it as another "Zanzibar"-like story of a ordinary city character... but I can't help but read it as being sung from the perspective of Billy Joel, international hitmaker, just wanting to slip a half a mile away to the old neighborhood, and simpler times.

On the other hand, some folks like to get away. Take a holiday from the neighborhood.

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

I always get this one confused with the song he did for the animated rat movie or whatever it was.

"Somewhere Out There"?

I don't know if I've ever actually heard the rat movie song, mind you.

"Half a Mile" is just up there with songs like "Dancin' in the Moonlight," - tunes I associate with poorly animated big-studio cat movies, like "The Aristocats", for really no reason at all.

Except they'd sound good as a fast number involving a bunch of dancing animals and a back-alley fence.

For the record, "Why Should I Worry," coming to us somewhere along the line, was for the dogs-and-cats Disney movie Oliver and Company, in which Billy plays the second or third lead as an animated mutt named Dodger.

"Half A Mile Away" is a nice song but for me the performance feels like Billy and the band trying to pull off a kind of lighter fun-time fare that doesn't fit them - somewhere between a Doobie Brothers album track and Elton in Step Into Christmas/Don't Go Breaking My Heart mode. They're not quite nimble enough for it, or something.

Would've made a good sitcom theme, tho'.

Another tight arrangement, and I smile at "talk about women and lie, lie, lie," but this feels like a dry run at the kind of song that he'd do better on An Innocent Man.

> the song he did for the animated rat movie

> in which Billy plays the second or third lead as an animated mutt named Dodger

Holy shit, Billy Joel was Phil Collins before Phil Collins was Phil Collins?

Mind. Blown.

The film also features Bette Midler, almost completely hived off in her own subplot as if it's a live-action feature built around the availability of its musical stars between tours. We'll be back here in a few years, but see also: Disney animated features: the Gothic period (1977-1988)

Zanzibar rules & def hear some Steely Dan in that as well

I'm reeling that one of my favorite hip hop loops of all time is a Billy Joel album track holy shit.....Road to the Riches

that reminds me, i finally uploaded my own 'stiletto'-employing track... track eight in a much larger, perpetually-unfinished and notionally seamless megamix kinda deal. also kind of just a big confused racket. billy shows up a little after a minute in.

disclaimer, it's a draft and there are some outright unfinished bits after minute four, where i ripped out some stuff from a previous version and never got around to replacing it. i also really wanna rethink or replace some of the afro-man stanzas as they read really differently to me than they did back when i first put this one together.

but i dunno it's amusing to me and maybe others here will get some mild kick out of it!

track eight in a much larger, perpetually-unfinished and notionally seamless megamix kinda deal. also kind of just a big confused racket.... disclaimer, it's a draft and there are some outright unfinished bits after minute four

A bit long for a board description, but promising

"Half A Mile Away" sounds like period white Philly soul.

lol YMP

and ooh yeah - Hall & Oates at this time might be an interesting comparison.

and by "ooh yeah" i mean "i agree." the hall & oates album "ooh yeah!" would be an anachronistic comparison.

rosalinda's eyes - yacht rock minus the hooks. a chorus, any chorus, would have helped. glad he reached for a flute/recorder rather than a moog. (also, this was his second "rosalinda" song! the other one, a melancholy arpeggio-fueled piano man-era demo, eventually came out on the expanded piano man reissue.)

half a mile away - this seems like a half-hearted attempt at so many better things. white philly soul, yup. innocent man but not as good, yup. glass houses power-pop, too, maybe. there's a stop-start feel to the rhythm of the verses that reminds me of the much better "sleeping with the television on." also, i always confuse this song w/rem's not even remotely similar "half a world away."

Dig the 'stiletto'-employing track.

Every once in a while I check in here, and all I can think is, phew, you masochists have a ways to go with this ...

Man, we're in the sweet spot right now. At least three more albums of cream until we hit a few slow spots.

All of his 1976-1983 albums are stronger that any album he made outside of that period, right? Best band, best producer, best songs.

Yeah that's pretty solidly the C.W. He's an artist with a pretty distinct "classic period" that most fans agree upon, and refusing your 1976-1983 timeframe would be pretty challopsy imo. (That said, I'm sure there are die-hard Billy fans who consider The Bridge or River of Dreams their favorite albums - YouTube comments are great for a reminder that for any artist that's sold as much as Billy, any given forgotten, underwritten album track is somebody's favorite song out of all songs ever recorded by anybody.)

and aww, thanks pplains!

I think I'm on record as being pretty pro-Billy, but I suspect I will not be participating very enthusiastically by the time it gets to River of Dreams. Just sayin. And I say this as someone who unabashedly loved Storm Front.

My senior prom's theme song was "This is the Time." Again, just sayin.

Can't wait till we get to track 12 of

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cd/Billy_Joel_-_Fantasies_%26_Delusions.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuV-zEqB2QQ

Until the Night is this album's big ol' prom ballad. A single in Europe, it peaked at #50 in the UK and went nowhere anyplace else. A couple of years later, it got a cover by Righteous Brother Bill Medley, a rare case of one of Joel's heroes actually taking on one of his written-in-the-style-of numbers. Two decades later, he'd induct both Brothers into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b8/Until_The_Night.jpg/220px-Until_The_Night.jpg

Rosalinda's Eyes - cosign what fcc said, this needs a hook. I like the quiet recorder solo though, a strange but fitting addition

Half A Mile Away - there's potential here, but they needed to go all the way with this to make it into the Elton John song it could have been. it seems like him and the band aren't fully committed. the mix doesn't really showcase the groove either

Until the Night - damn, those are some low notes at the beginning - doesn't even sound like him. At least this one hits the Righteous style on the head, but it's not a style I particularly like

until the night - feel like i've been a downer all week, but this way-too-on-the-nose homage is really not good. a lovingly produced and performed nothingburger. i do kinda like billy's attempt to be both bill medley and bobby hatfield, which he pulls off especially nicely in the bridge. which then gives way to richie cannata doing a clarence clemons homage, which serves as a helpful reminder that "until the night" would have been the 75th or 76th best song on born to run if only given the chance. my least favorite song on my least favorite of billy's classic albums.

as long as we have hall & oates and white philly soul on our minds, i will note that h&o had a a #12 pop hit with their cover of "you've lost that lovin' feeling" two years later. they were less faithful.

(in related unrelated news, hall & oates could be a fun listening thread one day.)

(YES IT WOULD)

Would like to see the video of the Billy Joel brothers singing this duet, crossfaded into each other whenever one takes a verse.