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

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For our last post for a few days, the chronology has worked out eerily well, wishing us all A Rosie Christmas. Released in 1999, at the height of The Rosie O'Donnell Show's popularity, it featured the eponymous comedian performing duets of familiar Christmas classics with a range of musical guests (including the ticklish muppet Elmo, also at the peak of his fame, and fading star Angelica Pickles, from The Rugrats). The 2000 sequel, Another Rosie Christmas, punts the daytime kids' TV characters but somehow ends up with Smash Mouth doing "Nuttin' For Christmas," and country child act Billy Gilman doing a timely new composition called "I'm Gonna Email Santa" - surely a bad trade.

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

Billy joins Rosie on "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," one of those seemingly eternal classics I was recently startled to realize had an actual origin when I watched Meet Me In St. Louis the other night; along with "The Trolley Song," it was written for the 1944 film by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. (See Judy Garland's film performance of it here - wowie.) While I will always be partial to the Percy Faith rendition highlighted on our family Christmas album of choice, Billy seems to make a go of it. Recalling that he approached "She's Right On Time" as some version of a Christmas song, it's interesting to note that he's kept this seeming one-off in his repertoire; YouTube features a number of recent live cuts, typically from December-time Madison Square Garden shows.

As a St. Louisan, I saw the movie at least once a year growing up. And I fucking cry at this scene! Every. fucking. time.

Still among my top two or three Christmas songs. I've even recorded a version of it myself.

Billy sounds like he's trying to croon in an unBillyish manner here; not quite sure whether he's trying for Bennett or Crosby or Mathis or what. Anyway, not Billy. Like with the Dylan cover, he's not at his best when aping another singer's stylez. Except Ray Charles. I don't mind as much when he's trying to sound like Ray.

Jumping around here, but related to that ^^, part of what makes "Light as the Breeze" one of the better Cohen covers I've heard is that he isn't aping Leonard but putting his own SNL-band-outro butter on it.

Given his pastichey instincts, it might have been fun to put all these artists' names in a hat and force him to do the covers in random styles, to get away from any "obvious" ways of doing the song. But by this point his range of choices is much smaller than it was on Glass Houses or Innocent Man - he can do whatever style he feels like, so long as it's something that he doesn't feel embarrassed to be attempting at 47, which means we're going to generally be in AC/lounge act territory.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wheel+of+musical+impressions

Pressure just came on the mix. Can we just end this thread so the humans can survive

When “only the good die young” comes on in the bar, only the schmalziest of motherfuckers order their drinks. The rest wait for fucking bad company

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

Where Were You On Our Wedding Day? is another cover turning our ear back to the early days of rock. The 1959 original is by Lloyd Price, best known for "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and a hit version of "Stagger Lee." In an unprecedented development, Billy's rendition is actually shorter than Price's. It was his contribution to the soundtrack album for the 1999 Roberts-Gere comedy Runaway Bride. The lineup is somewhat odd for a compilation like this; Hall & Oates and the Dixie Chicks get two songs each (including an established hit and a new song), and current stars mix with old fuddy-duddies and Miles Davis. I'm going to guess that the liner notes assert some kind of "something old, something new" theme, since it would have been easy enough to cobble together a list of wedding-oriented songs for a slate of covers by artists hitting the right demographics. Maybe "Maneater" is used for a comical beat in the film?

If you're keeping track, wedding-wise Joel was at this point in between his divorce from Christie Brinkley and his 2004 marriage to the then-23-year-old Katie Lee Joel, best known as the uncompelling host of the first season of Bravo's Top Chef. On their wedding day, they were at Billy's house in Oyster Bay, with Alexa Ray (five years the bride's junior) as maid-of-honor. Wikipedia does not make clear where they were in 2009 when they announced their separation, but Billy's 2015 marriage to Alexis Roderick (then 33) also took place at his Long Island home, with Andrew Cuomo officiating. They have two children; the youngest arrived this October 22nd, when we were discussing... "An Innocent Man."

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billy has an obvious love for, and feel for, this era. and yet his vocal on this is pretty much replacement-level wedding band singer (which maybe is fitting for the movie?). the sax solo is a note-for-note copy of the original, which is great.

excellent wedding reporting, doctor c!

Decent enough pastiche.

Lloyd Price rules, btw. "Stagger Lee" obvs, but check out "Just Because" if you dig this kind of thing (in its non-ersatz form).

yeah the vocal here is a real shame. reinforces my sense that he should have done more of this when he was younger, and that a medley of covers in a new-wave take on 50s rock style would have been a great finisher to Glass Houses.

tune-yards is having a heart attack-ack-ack!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-7je-jsuC4

... and clearly, I've been working too hard to get this thread back on track-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack! next entry coming monday.

My pick for worst.

I can't really argue - though I still find "Modern Woman" more interesting than anybody else itt. Maybe having been oblivious to that era of pop at the time, it sounds fresher and more interesting to me than it actually is.

Meantime... I got sort of bogged down contemplating how to tackle the 2001 classical album, Fantasies and Delusions, afraid that a track-by-track treatment of instrumental music would leave us with little to discuss. In hindsight if I'd just done it like that we'd be well past it by now. I'll double back and do it in a bit but given my energy level and to-do list today, let's skip past for a moment and admire two duets with the legendary Tony Bennett:

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Playin' With My Friends: Bennett Sings The Blues was a 2001 release featuring Bennett, as you'd expect, teaming up with a range of contemporary and slightly-less-contemporary artists including Sheryl Crow, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, etc. Produced by none other than Phil Ramone, it includes Joel and Tony turning in a rendition of one of Billy's theme tunes, New York State of Mind. Supposedly, it was released as a single (maybe promo-only); it did not chart. To my ears, it ain't bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji2EDTCXHBM

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Duets: An American Classic, again helmed by Ramone, carried on a similar idea while reaching for the "great American songbook" format of Rod Stewart's unexpected hit series of such albums. If it didn't match Rod's numbers, it still did well, debuting at #3 on the Billboard album chart and ultimately going platinum. This time around, partners included Paul McCartney, John Legend, Stevie again, the Dixie Chicks, etc. In a cute reversal, Billy joins for one of Tony's signature tunes, The Good Life, originally written by Sacha Distel and James Reardon for the forgotten French-Italian anthology film The Seven Deadly Sins, and a hit for Tony first in 1963.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCOqn6fpF9o

I am so heartily sick of Tony Bennett that I can't even listen to that second one, sorry.

They've done NYSOM a bunch live. That's all the Joel-Bennett I can stomach (indeed, slightly more).

Did a furious four hour binge through Billy Joel's golden era on Sunday, taking me up to the end of An Innocent Man. Given that I literally just knew the classic tape version of the Greatest Hits initially (and later, the CD version additions), it was super enlightening, and massive thanks to all the regular contributors to the thread. It's fucking brilliant. I was following it initially then said I'd get back to it at later date but apparently that took me six months.

Conclusions on BJ:

So many fade-outs. So many woah woah owoahowahs. So many side-B turkeys! But at the same time, when he gets it right it's spellbinding. Was totally clueless about the content and context of the individual albums too, so discovering An Innocent Man was a bit of a joy. It actually has two tunes – An Innocent Man and Keeping The Faith – that in particular it was amazing to discover. I liked the idea that he might have just retired after that!

Also, I'm not entirely surprised that it didn't come up, but We Didn't Start A Fire was converted into a football song for the Republic of Ireland ahead of the World Cup in Italy in 1990, titled We're Gonna Start A Fire, where the rapid fire spitting out of nouns was obviously suited to creating an amazing nostalgia fest.

I present it here for your delectation now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdnZgmwA9h4

i envy your four-hour first-time binge!

Your childhood memories of each song were central to my enjoyment actually, because so much of my Billy Joel time derives from car drives with the two-volume Greatest Hits on cassette as a kid (along with the Red and Blue albums, but of course). On the chorus of Goodnight Saigon the tape actually wore out so you could hear Anthony's Song backwards.

aww thanks. and wow that sounds amazing... all washed into the helicopter noise.

i realize you said the chorus but I'm picturing the big helicopter sequence

in the wild: "keeping the faith" playing on fox & friends coming out of a commercial and leading into a mention of billy graham's death. (no, i am not a regular fox & friends watcher. i assume billy isn't either.)

On the chorus of Goodnight Saigon the tape actually wore out so you could hear Anthony's Song backwards.

As if Anthony thought he was getting out of the daily grind...and then got drafted!

Ha! Fuckin hate that Anto.

One other conclusion from the BJ binge: he wrote a middle eight on every tune. Very disciplined.

BILLY JOEL PLAYS “PIANO MAN” FOR THE FIRST TIME AT THE BAR HE BASED THE SONG ON

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/billy-joel-plays-piano-man-for-the-first-time-at-the-bar-he-based-the-song-on

OLD MAN: Hold on, are you trying to say that I requested a song without giving you the name or melody? That I just expected you to guess, like a mind reader or something? That never happened, that’s slander! And who the hell calls it a tonic and gin?

oops i didn’t fcc had already posted it
sorry :(

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Feelin’ that A minor pentatonic

Truly any caption would work

Oh wait big B’s not actually playing any note at all there

Tony Soprano subs for Silvio Dante in the E Street Band

Billy has always been shameless so this photo shouldn’t shock me but it does anyway. Jilly Boel

in the wild: frankie valli and the four seasons in the supermarket tonight. spent out 10 seconds trying to place the song before i realized it was billy. "uptown girl," obvi.

oh man now that i have my computer back online again it's high time i opened up the spreadsheet and unveiled another late-period billy jam!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkmj6_hufko

All My Life, not to be confused with a somewhat better-known song with a similar title, was one of two non-album singles Billy issued in 2007. It was his first original composition to see the light of day since 1993 - and Phil Ramone was back at the console! Intended as a second-anniversary tribute to third wife Katie Lee (b. 1981), it was first released as a Valentine's Day exclusive through the website of People magazine. It then became an iTunes exclusive, and eventually got some kind of limited release as a CD-single (including in Japan, where it made it to #94 on the charts). There seems to have been a video (mostly in-studio footage), but the only versions I can find online look like they were taped off the air and then digitized at some pathetically low resolution, so I won't bother.

I can't recall ever hearing it before. It's... nice? Reminds me a little of the verse from "I've Loved These Days" filtered through the Sinatra/Bennett classicist-pop sensibility he'd been exploring in some of the other post-River releases.

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i had no idea this song existed. decent sinatra/bennett/etc imitation, but kinda terrible song. the bridge starting at 2:15 showcases some of the worst singing he's ever committed to tape and is just ugh. and, wait, there are still more than 3 minutes to go in this song? excuse me while i get a glass of milk and a snack. i'll be right back.

Sounds like a cut from a Julia Roberts soundtrack.

Everyone needs to go online and search "Billy Joel 69" today.

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It's his birthday!

nice

Very good this and hella illuminating about all sorts

http://www.vulture.com/2018/07/billy-joel-in-conversation.html

wow yeah that is a v good interview

wait, did we know before this that rick rubin wanted to do an album with him?

i would love to hear that album!

I think you can safely assume Rick Rubin has approached every single canonical old rocker and offered them the "Johnny Cash Treatment"

ha, fair point. i do not want to hear the billy joel johnny cash roots album. but i very much do want to hear the billy joel billy joel roots album. "miami 2018."

Or Billy Joel's tribute to the great American songbook.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

It's Too Darn Hot

Oh What a Beautiful Mornin'

Etc.

this is a great interview. billy getting yessed out!

"I’m looking at Axl like, Aren’t you interested in, you know, meeting these women? No, he just wanted to talk about “Captain Jack.”"

Axl plans to sit at home and maahstabate