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

oh man this defines "undistinguished." I don't hear Winwood so much as Billy Joel trying to sing "Tell Her About It" in the style of Steve Winwood.

Almost the entire song is outside his natural range, it sounds like aural constipation.

Hmmm - wonder if he was also losing his range faster than he was willing to admit.

A word about "Leningrad": in 1996, one of my oldest friends, a dancer, performed a number choreographed to "Leningrad." It involved unimaginative ballet and the dancers holding candles. Afterward she grumbled that she wished they'd used the candles to set fire to the choreographer.

Almost the entire song is outside his natural range, it sounds like aural constipation.

― attention vampire (MatthewK), Tuesday, November 28, 2017 7:19 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this

catching up again:

"storm front": first time the production really grates, artificial textures meeting up with authentic composition in a really queasy symbiosis. aims for "sledgehammer," doesn't even hit huey lewis
"leningrad": man, this one is great, i think, the verse melody is just so lovely, and the vaporous production really serves the emotion billy's trying to get across
"state of grace": yeah i bet you imagine daryl hall singing this one billy. there's also a lot of cool stuff happening with the arrangement in this one e.g. the way the guitar solo just kinda happens, surprise! or, "i'm losing you!!!!" and all the instruments drop out except for synth and piano. lovely song i think (i see that no one agrees)
"when in rome": i thought we had left this particular billy voice behind :| also like... prob the filler-y-est thing i've heard on this record yet, par for the course for a penultimate billy joel album track i guess

haha "When in Rome" starts and I expect to hear "FEEEEATURING JAAAAN HOOOOKS! PHIIIIIL HARTMAAAAAN! JOHN LOOOOOOVITZ!"

I like 'State of Grace' - it's pretty. I kind of like adult contemporary mode Billy - same with 'She's Right On Time' from The Nylon Curtain.

^^ same

"State of Grace": it's been a while since I really liked an album track but I thought this one was great. Interesting chord changes, vibe reminiscent of H&O's "Say It Isn't So". The guitar solo is nice. I want him to sing a little more restrained though

"When in Rome": could be the most generic song he's ever put out. Everything here sounds like a hundred other songs, zero inspiration. And we get a cliched saying as the chorus, the cherry on top

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo-QhF-aMFA

And So It Goes closes the album with a bit of a throwback; it'd been around since a 1984 demo, and was apparently inspired by Joel's relationship with Elle Macpherson. It is a sudden, almost jarring return to form.... whatever it's about, it sounds so much like a Billy Joel ballad that I am instantly back on board for the finish. The final US single from the album, it made it to #37 (#5 on Adult Contemporary). The video is a tasteful little live performance.

With numerous covers by acts you've never heard of, I can only single out the bagpipe rendition by Jori Chisholm.

https://img.discogs.com/V_UGCrRYXxZKXoLyCL4pZP6nPjk=/fit-in/600x605/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-8487765-1506781837-3335.jpeg.jpg

upper miss OTMFM x 1,000 about the vibe of "When in Rome."

The horn-driven white-funk blandrock of SNL (and other late-night bands) is a bizarrely specific late-20th century thing that has very few real fans and very few real-world exponents. When we talk about that musical style, sometimes people say it's like Springsteen but that's only partly right. Bruce / E Street Band have more range and more modes than that; probably like half of their output sounds like this.

But "When in Rome" is totally an in-the-wild sighting of the SNL band sound. Good call UMS.

I love "And So it Goes" though I don't listen to it very often. Very close to my heart and bound up with my personal romantic history; I doubt I can see it straight on in a way that would allow me to make a decent post about it.

The horn-driven white-funk blandrock of SNL (and other late-night bands) is a bizarrely specific late-20th century thing that has very few real fans and very few real-world exponents

the other big place you would see it was in early 80s movies before they were willing to shell out for big licensed soundtracks (or films that didn't have the budget) so they would get these generic-ish "rock n' roll" bands for party scenes or club scenes that would play this digi-piano and fake horn driven type of shit...

classic example would be the the BusBoys, featured with "The Boys Are Back in Town" (no, not THAT song another one with the same title) and "Cleanin' Up the Town" from the Ghostbusters soundtrack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BusBoys

but yeah So It Goes is throwing back to the Turnstiles, 52nd Street era all of a sudden....and Mick Jones doesn't get his meaty paws all over it production-wise...good song!

It might have gotten buried upthread, but the SNL connection goes deeper: Lenny Pickett, on sax, joined the SNL band in 1985 and became its co-director a decade later, upon the exit of G.E. Smith. I agree that as a genre, this stuff - good jazz players shackled to a feel-good-during-your-work-day rhythm section - can't possibly have many fans... it's incidental music and almost by design it works for bumpers going to commercial, not for a four-minute song.

I keep wanting the "like the Romans do" backing vocals to lead me into a more interesting song, specifically ... um, it's on Scary Monsters I think?

Overall this album has more good material than I was expecting, but is kind of an exhausting listen. I would still rather an entire record of keyboard-backed history raps, or a dramatic "unplugged" swing into being an AC balladeer along the lines of this last song (which I find quite pretty). The latter might be a huge disaster but at least he'd be forced to really develop his melodies again instead of burying their weakness in Big Boogie.

BRIDGE - Middle age ennui

STORM FRONT - deterioration and death

NEXT ALBUM... Journey into the spiritual hereafter.

...

COLD SPRING HARBOR - When you're young and your voice sounds like a chipmunk.

sorta realizing that the quality of albums across billy's career is pretty even! once the production settled with ramone, each is about half weighted with great songs, half weighted with filler or non-descript whatever. the only ones where great songs outweight the filler imo are glass houses and innocent man, which are incidentally the albums on which billy seems most energized and enthusiastic about what he's doing

"and so it goes" is an incredible song, my favorite closer that's not "keeping the faith." he so rarely lands an album well that it feels even more remarkable

Billy's unofficial cover of Bette Midler's "The Rose."

The Rose is better than any Billy Joel song imo

I would put The Stranger on the list of "majority good" albums, but it's close. Basically if he'd released half as many albums (one every other year rather than one a year), and only used the good songs he'd have an incredible and easy to recommend discography. But that's not how the business was structured back then, sadly.

like idk check this out. assume that any missing favorites become sweet b-sides and that any too-long running times are fixed by reining in some instrumental passages a la the single mixes of some of the big songs. some of these are insane sequences and obviously we're in fanfic territory but idk it's a pretty good haul of songs and most folks would not know to miss "rosalinda's eyes" (though i would).

Piano Spring Harbor

Travelin' Prayer
Everybody Loves You Now
Why Judy Why
Falling of the Rain
Captain Jack

She's Got A Way
Piano Man
You Look So Good To Me
You're My Home
Stop In Nevada
Tomorrow Is Today

Turnstile Serenade

Say Goodbye To Hollywood
Summer, Highland Falls
James
The Mexican Connection
New York State of Mind

Prelude/Angry Young Man
The Entertainer
Root Beer Rag
I've Loved These Days
Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)

52nd Stranger

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
The Stranger
Honesty
Just The Way You Are
Stiletto

Big Shot
My Life
Vienna
Only The Good Die Young
She's Always A Woman
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant

Glass Curtains

You May Be Right
Sometimes A Fantasy
Don't Ask Me Why
It's Still Rock 'n' Roll To Me
Close to the Borderline

Sleeping with the Television On
Laura
All For Leyna
She's Right On Time
Pressure

("Allentown" and "Goodnight Saigon" debut on the Greatest Hits, becoming Billy's "September" and "Slip Slidin' Away" respectively.)

An Innocent Man

(leave alone. if you really hate "easy money" or w/e, just but reach into the vaults for whatever pretty-good album track I cut above that could be passably reinvented in the style of, say, Elvis, Lesley Gore, or a young Stevie Wonder...)

Bridge of Storms

Running On Ice
I Go To Extremes
This Is The Time
The Downeaster "Alexa"
And So It Goes

A Matter of Trust
We Didn't Start the Fire
That's Not Her Style
Baby Grand
The Night Is Still Young

"And So It Goes" is one of those tunes that I heard a lot in summer '90 and it's disappeared.

Meanwhile....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccx6Osu1x34

House of Blue Light was the b-side to "We Didn't Start the Fire." Not to be confused with the classic "House of Blue Lights," it did not appear on an album until the My Lives box, which also dubbed in the harmonica heard in the YouTube above. The harmonica-free single version is out there on YouTube but only in awful lo-fi quality. I trust you can live without it.

Dr., I applaud your alternate-universe Jilly Boel who had a career of surer hits but fewer records. I believe I would like that artist quite a lot. You are also right that the industry wasn't set up for that kind of career (and I am not sure Our Billy would have been satisfied with that release schedule anyway).

(Or... maybe not. Maybe when presented with the album "Glass Curtains," might we have just recalibrated our expectations and liked our favorite few and snoozed through others? Impossible to know.)

Because I hate River of Dreams, I am not sure how much more I will be able to say in this thread. In case I don't get a chance to say so, I will take this opportunity to express deep thanks to the good Doctor and all the other participants. It's certainly been a ride.

Don't mind this one so much, but it's Stockholm Syndrome now. I'm happy that it at least sounds organic, compared to the synthed-up background vox and click tracks we've been hearing.

And not a bad twofer list, DC. Turnstile Serenade not a bad album name either.

doc! where the hell is "zanzabar" in those condensed records!!!!

otherwise i'm especially down with turnstile serenade if phil ramone were onboard by then

I love Zanzibar, but that album sort of resists compression - felt I could have either it or Stiletto but not both...

hm i feel u

anyway i also agree that the stranger deserves to be included on the "majority good" albums, he just whiffs the ending so bad that it makes me think of the record poorly

what's funny is that if you end the record with "she's always a woman," it becomes all killer and is a tidy but still album-length 32 minutes

(glass houses is only 35 minutes and not coincidentally it mostly rules)

"House of Blue Light": yawn

Holy shit, this is endless...

okay we have a new winner/loser...house of blue light is the worst song we've heard thus far

in an alternate universe, billy joel replaces jeff healey in roadhouse

And now, as the world disintegrates yet further, our weekend listening - a small odds-and-sods roundup! All of a sudden in the 1990s, Billy became a pretty active contributor of cover versions to soundtracks and compilations. I'm not sure of the reason for this, but I'm going to guess it's financial - maybe being out from under the Artie Ripp deal meant that it suddenly was more attractive to do recordings that offered no prospect of songwriter royalties? Or maybe it has something to do with his management shakeup and legal troubles, about which more next time.

Anyway, I wasn't sure exactly how to cover these since they are only tenuously part of the 'canon' and even most fans probably don't know them. They're actually a pleasant surprise at this juncture - to me, Billy sounds relaxed and like he's having fun, which is a change of pace after some of the arthritic grunting and thrashing on Storm Front. But I don't know if a listening thread has hit an artist that has this particular kind of 'long tail' of covers and minor works. Rather than leave them out entirely, or dribble them out over days of thread-killing listening, I'm just going to consolidate them into a couple of compilation posts: this one, and then one or two coming after River of Dreams and the other miscellaneous material (e.g. the new Joel originals on the third Greatest Hits). If you prefer to bow out of the thread at the end of RoD, I don't blame you, but I - and perhaps I alone - will see this spreadsheet of songs through to the end.

So, here's what we've got...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbr_cg-6OQk

When You Wish Upon A Star, with Billy in Ray mode again, was provided for the 1991 Disney Channel / direct-to-video offering Simply Mad About The Mouse. I don't need to run down the rest of the all-star track list because two years ago, soref made of it a poll: Simply Mad About the Mouse: A Musical Celebration of Imagination Do give a moment or two to the video, which features a jitterily-animated Billy pulling his version of a "Take On Me."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej9hYC1-_RI

In A Sentimental Mood, the Duke Ellington/Manny Kurtz classic, comes to us by way of the soundtrack to the 1992 baseball comedy classic A League of Their Own. Similarly to what we just heard, this was a case of a high-concept soundtrack, this time with adult-contemporary hitmakers (James Taylor! Carol King! The Manhattan Transfer!) covering big-name songs of the 30s and 40s. Taken together, these two Billy numbers suggest he might have done well to anticipate Rod Stewart's Songbook albums, and just start knocking out whole records of this kind of material.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGqiX8fB6A4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsktHpH5QGk

Finally, Heartbreak Hotel and All Shook Up hail from another "current stars, classic tunes" soundtrack, to another 1992 comedy: the forgotten Cage/Caan/Parker joint, Honeymoon in Vegas. As Wiki explains, The soundtrack was composed mainly of covers of Elvis Presley songs performed by many contemporary artists. Also included are the ramblings of Chief Orman when Mahi Mahi takes Jack to his Chief's shack instead of Korman's beach side mansion. Other big names include Willie Nelson, Mellencamp, Yoakam, Tritt, Amy Grant, and Bono. "All Shook Up" was in fact released as a single; it peaked at #92 on Billboard and #15 on Adult Contemporary.

https://img.discogs.com/6IlwRt_h8ws4VtgLGJ4ViHq303g=/fit-in/600x519/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-7306987-1438507522-4859.jpeg.jpg

Are you going to do "To Make You Feel my Love"?

But of course!

You didn't mention Bryan Ferry! His cover of "Are You Lonesome Tonight" is tops.

Joel does fine by "All Shook Up."

felt it was generous even to allow him as "another big name" tbh but i will admit that ferry is a major blind spot for me as far as pop-rock for squares and their parents is concerned

maybe because he's not for squares or parents? idk

what should i check out by him? there is a strong and embarrassing possibility I have been conflating him with bryan adams for most of my life...

now I'm imagining early Roxy Music doing Summer of 69

yet Bryan Ferry could sing "Heaven."

"When You Wish Upon a Star" and "In a Sentimental Mood" are preferable to any Rod Stewart standard, but only because anything is.

"All Shook Up" is perfunctory, but he sounds committed to it, and its not unpleasant. His "Heartbreak Hotel" is lugubrious, though.

Amused to learn that two of these songs were from Honeymoon In Vegas and another from A League of Their Own, as I saw both films at a double feature in the Summer of '92 (twas a preview screening for the former, back when studios did that).

You say Ray Charles for "Wish Upon a Star", but he's hitting some Neil Diamond buttons in the lead-up.

All this Rod Stewart talk makes me wonder which Tom Waits song WMJ should've covered.

We need a Ferry listening thread for Doc Casino

i have an album's worth of catching up to do.

that's not her style – that's not *his* style, musically speaking, is it? i could see elton john giving this a go in the mid-'70s, though, circa rock of the westies. and making it better. it's catchy in a way that billy can hardly help being. i hate it less than most of y'all seem to hate it.

we didn't start the fire – not a song i ever had any particular use for or ever need to hear again, but now that i'm making myself listen, it's hard not to notice what a perfectly constructed pop song it is. pretty much designed to be the annoying hit that it became. (also, pplains otmfm on this one.)

downeaster alexa – allentown at sea. with better details. i love this.

i go to extremes – there's a thin line between billy being introspective and billy being a string of clichés, and this one walks that line like a tightrope. i would love to hear it with innocent man arrangement and production. or totally phil spector'd out.

shameless – AOR. (also did billy actually write "i'm not a man who's ever been
insecure about the world i've been living in"? so much for introspection.)

storm front – why are the background vocals saying "mood indigo" on the choruses?

leningrad – this sounds more like goodnight saigon than i remembered. especially on the bridges. i like this a lot. he's good at this sort of thing, also, his voice sounds like it suddenly got 10 years younger.

state of grace – i'm going to blame mick jones for this one. it's a pretty straightforward divorce song with one of those melodies that billy circa innocent man could write in his sleep, and he may well have written this in one in his actual sleep, but it works. (whoever compared it to "she's right on time" upthread is otm.) but the production tries to blow it up into a stadium-rock moment that it totally doesn’t need, or want, to be. it sounds like it's seven minutes long.

when in rome – does billy have a drawer full of songs like this that's labeled "end of side 2" that he randomly pulls from every time he gets to the end of side 2 on an album?

and so it goes – gorgeous. i could hear warren zevon singing this.