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

Days away! Worry not!

Which of you was it who busted out a really perfect gif of Liberty polishing a headlight from the Uptown Girl video?

going into garages for exotic massages, if billy is to be trusted on this one

― yellow is the color of some raisins (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, August 9, 2017 7:03 PM

well that's a step up from sitting at home and masturbating, if you ask me.

― fact checking cuz, Wednesday, August 9, 2017 8:36 PM

y not both

― Yoni Loves Chocha (VegemiteGrrl), Wednesday, August 9, 2017 8:45 PM

http://i.imgur.com/Wawj5V5.gif

― pplains, Wednesday, August 9, 2017 9:52 PM

August 9 seems like more than half a mile away now.

pplains = hero

More of a shopping center hero, but thank you.

Yeah we've been at this for more than two months now! Hard to believe. Thanks muchly to all the regulars and joiners, and to those who've even taken the time to post catch-up entries. This thread is now basically the best Billy Joel discussion on the Internet! Hopefully it's contributing something of value to our wider ILM discourse going forward...

Great song, probably the best new find for me of this whole thread so far. It has a great nervy energy to it and the synth parts fit well too

Yeah, this is a really solid track. I like the creepy intensity of the sound, and how the crush prompted by this one-time-thing starts bleeding over into wider adolescent paranoia and nobody-understands-ism. Maybe not top tier Joel for me because it's doesn't have as much of the "singable" quality that means a lot to me in his stuff. The vocal has a cool rhythm to it that really sells the screwed-too-tight brain of the character, but it's not all that melodic. BLAH, blah da de BLAH, blah blah BLAH. That's okay though, stepping sideways genre-wise is letting him make songs that play to slightly different strengths.

Meanwhile, just today, I started hearing the title line as "awful anal." Which is really stupid, but ironically the kind of thing that might actually get our teenage protagonist to loosen up with an awkward laugh.

For me, the stompy feel and jerky melody of "All for Leyna" prefigures "Allentown."

You can even mash them together. Try it!

"We / laid on the beach / iron and coal / chromium steel."

"She / stood on the tracks / if we worked hard / if we behaved."

"She / gave me a night / filling out forms / standing in line."

"Roxanne" predates this!

well you dudes can get all bunged up about the lyrical content of only the good die young or always a woman but for me this one is creepy af
like, he’s on “i want you” levels of scary stalker psychopath that makes me wanna spend the night at Leyna’s & maybe greet Billy with a bat

song wise, pretty neat...like a blender smoothie of Blinded By The Light & Hold The Line & Video Killed The Radio Star

Yeah, when I was a 13-year-old listening to this I was like "I can tell this is about a part of boy-girl stuff that I don't really understand and that doesn't feel like a part of boy-girl stuff I'm looking forward to." I think it's sort of inextricably bound up in my mind with some of the parts of Stephen King novels I didn't really understand, like the creepy guy they buy Christine from.

xp Haha I was totally thinking "Hold the Line" too but frankly, Toto has gotten enough attention recently

Going back a song: agree about the fundamental goodwill of "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me," which I think is not

"you young smartasses think you're doing something new but it's just a dressed-up version of the same old shit"

but

"there's always something new and exciting going on and "rock and roll" doesn't refer to a fusty musical style guys like me are experts in and can't escape, but rather the eternal openness to new sounds and looks"

And I would compare it to Joe Jackson's "I'm the Man," which is also in some sense a list of trends, and which is a much, much better song (sorry Billy) but which is at it's heart cynical and sour; the narrator of "I'm the Man" really IS trying to sell you old shit in a new box, while the narrator of "Still Rock and Roll" wants you to know he's fine with the new box because he's sure there's a nice present inside.

Tbf its probably his dick

ha I love how y'all talk about these tracks and I think "hmmm, don't think I know this one" and then I listen and my teenage memories come roaring back full force like with this ridiculously histrionic song about Leyna, I love the keyboard fills

great posts everybody. veg captures something of my relationship to "all for leyna" - I don't relate to it like I'm the protagonist, but more like it's an intentionally creepy portrait of some dangerous unsettling freak played by crispin glover. basically it's "i can't stand losing you" but with the outward aggression coming through more clearly. that lennon influence again maybe. the allentown connection is amazing and will probably haunt my future hearings of this song as much or more than "awful anal."

and joe jackson... yeah. " i'm the man" is a high bar for anybody to top. his two 1979 albums had to have been on billy's mind - "close to the borderline," coming up on side B, is the joe jackson equivalent to the leon- and elton-styled numbers we've encountered previously.

like a blender smoothie of Blinded By The Light & Hold The Line & Video Killed The Radio Star

"all for leyna" vs. "hold the line" vs. "jane" vs. "fantasy" vs. "blinded by the light" vs. half the buggles catalog would be another good thread that's maybe already been done.

"close to the borderline," coming up on side B, is the joe jackson equivalent to the leon- and elton-styled numbers we've encountered previously.

Oh my god I am so psyched to argue with you about this assertion with which I enthusiastically disagree -- but we must wait

I look forward to that! Spoiler alert, I like both JJ and the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhn4mH3uA1A

I Don't Want To Be Alone starts Side Two by dialing down the keyed-up stressed-out intensity, for a somewhat garbled tale of quarreling lovers making up, or an affair, or a pro domme session, or something.

Since I don't have much to report here, I'll use this space to amend my album introduction, which neglected to mention that the record won Joel the recently-established Grammy for Best Rock Vocal Performance (Male). Apparently he won for the whole album, even though the other nominees (indeed nearly every nominee in the category's history) were there for individual songs (Jackson Browne's "Boulevard," Kenny Loggins's "I'm Alright," Paul McCartney's "Coming Up," and Bruce Springsteen's 'Detroit medley' - "Devil With a Blue Dress," etc.). Glass Houses was also nominated for Album of the Year, which you'll recall was won the year before by 52nd Street; the other losers were The Wall, Sinatra's Trilogy, and Streisand's Guilty and the statue went to Michael Omartian as the producer of Christopher Cross.

• Why would he feel so uncomfortable wearing a suit and tie when he's one of the few rock star guys who regularly wears one onstage?

• I nominate this one as the Ronnie Spector song of this album.

• Good Lord, the Grammys have always sucked, haven't they? Though Pink Floyd walking into a room with Sinatra and Streisand and only ... Christopher Cross comes walking out, man, that's a scene right there.

https://i.imgur.com/j0hKNtV.jpg

But ain't that America, home of the free. Little Glass Houses for you and me.

https://i.imgur.com/l9yQDCf.jpg

Miss D. Boon every day.

D. Sutherland more like, from the teeth and the glint in his eyes

i love that every single one of these billy joel youtubes features the comment "this is my favorite song from my favorite billy joel album"

i like the song a lot though. delivery v elvis costello

like a blender smoothie of Blinded By The Light & Hold The Line & Video Killed The Radio Star

"all for leyna" vs. "hold the line" vs. "jane" vs. "fantasy" vs. "blinded by the light" vs. half the buggles catalog would be another good thread that's maybe already been done.

― fact checking cuz, Monday, September 25, 2017 10:53 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"fantasy" by aldo nova, "runaway" by bon jovi

i like the song a lot though. delivery v elvis costello

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Tuesday, September 26, 2017 10:20 AM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is really "My Aim is True" era Elvis C

AH'M AVOIDIN' ALL THE HARD COLD FACTS I GOTTA FACE

this really does sound like My Aim is True-era EC, which makes sense as most of the old guard (Nicks, Buckingham, Simon) were obsessed with him 1979-1979.

that's a very specific range, Alfred

you bet!

ugh All for Leyna is just terrible, sorry. Aside from the lyrical sentiment the gratingly punchy stiffness of it is really unpleasant, this rigid 4/4 grid pattern that alternates between half-time and double-time that never swings or moves at all, it's like some archetypal "white guys have no rhythm" joke.

I Don't Want to Be Alone is def in the EC school, as noted, doesn't really do anything interesting with it though

AH'M AVOIDIN' ALL THE HARD COLD FACTS I GOTTA FACE

So wait, did he successfully avoid them, or does he in fact gotta face them?

maybe it's two separate phrases

"I"m avoiding all the hard cold facts / I've got a face"

He has to face them but he's not doing so. Works for me. I just have no idea what the plot is - from stanza to stanza it feels like a totally different situation is being described, a failing that's cropped up earlier in songs like "My Life," that at least get by on catchiness and a sense of shared attitude among the pieces.

yeah he is consistently a sloppy and careless lyricist

Ehhh I don't know about that - more like there are songs he put in that extra time on, and songs where he sort of went with the first draft, or different chunks written at different moments without him making a final decision "okay the song's about THIS so i do need to rewrite that other part from when I thought it was about THAT."

On the other hand, he does tell an anecdote about how "It's Still Rock And Roll To Me" - I'm 90% sure that's the song in question - had no final lyrics until the day of recording, and he was scribbling it all down in the back seat of a car with Liberty, heading in to the studio from Long Island. And that one I think actually is very much on-topic, whatever other quibbles one might have.

I nominate this one as the Ronnie Spector song of this album

absolutely. he makes it rather explicit during the fadeout. ohh-ohh ohh-ohh ohhh-ooh-ohhooh.

i see the elvis costello thing, too, but this song just seems so ... minor. and not quite of a piece with the rest of the album. a weird choice for side 2 track 1, especially considering the options that lay ahead.

also, he sounds like he had a cold when he did the vocal. if there's a less sexy way to deliver "ooh it's so erotic having you tell me how it should feel," i can't imagine what it would be.

I get that I'm a bit more lyrics-fixated than the average listener but there's just too many clunkers and shitty POVs in his lyrics for me to really rate him, and this listening exercise has only clarified that for me, whether it's the clumsy character details in Piano Man or the casual misogyny (so many to choose from!) or the half-assed attempts at Dylan, Fagen or Costello, the guy rarely delivered anything that comes across as self-assured and fully formed. His best pieces seem to consistently be (like "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me") tossed off, snotty pastiches that get by by virtue of clever melodic phrasing and delivery, and not so much on interesting details or depth or mise-en-scene or juxtapositions or ambiguity.

maybe "self-assured" is the wrong word there (he's got plenty of righteous-anger-by-way-of-crippling-inferiority-complex thing going on), just that he never seems to hit on a lyrical approach that really has a solid foundation, a clearly thought out style, a voice, he's too busy second-guessing himself.

and when he does seem to be at his most uniquely Billy-Joelian heartfelt and honest (whatever those things mean in the context of 70s singer-songwriter-dom) the sentiments that do come to the fore are invariably creepy and off-putting (Always a Woman, You May Be Right)

(please note I am not arguing that Billy needed to be more "authentic" or whatever, just that when he chose to adopt that as a songwriting strategy it inevitably came out gross - whereas his other strategies - going for a Bruce or Dylan homage, for example - just come off forced and inadequate)

i agree with so much of what you're saying and yet, I like him! Gotta think on this some more, 'cause these are faults that I would find really glaring in some other writers.

I consider myself more than adequately familiar with the creative output of Declan Patrick Aloysius Macmanus. The vocal delivery of "I Don't Want To Be Alone" certainly has similarities to MAIT-era Elvis, but the underlying music is... sloppier? More American? Funkier? I'm not sure how to describe it.

rarely delivered anything that comes across as self-assured and fully formed. His best pieces seem to consistently be (like "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me") tossed off, snotty pastiches that get by by virtue of clever melodic phrasing and delivery

Well, yeah. My take is that he gets to a point with a given lyric where he says "this is good enough for a single" and figures it will do fine in the marketplace. And it generally DOES do fine in the marketplace. Partly because of his general bravado, but partly because his mad skillz as a melodist, musician, and all-round hitmaker are pretty solid.

Put it this way: if your third draft usually gets you into Casey's top 40, what incentive do you have to write a fourth draft?

i think it's also that billy, more than many or most of his peers, is a pure music-first guy. he strikes me as the kind of composer who, having finished a piece of music, doesn't ask himself "what do i want to say?" but rather "what do i have to do to finish this thing?" i think a lot of, ahem, honesty will come out that way, 'cause if you're just throwing words out into the air to make them fit a melody or to finish an exercise, chances are pretty good they're going to carry some of your inner being along with them. with billy, that means a lot of insecurity, anger, bitterness, paranoia and random memories and nostalgia. but it's passive messaging. he's not trying to express ideas so much as they just kind of tumble out as he searches for serviceable rhymes and turns of phrases.

otm

yeah that sounds about right

Brilly Joel school of songwriting