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

a highlight of songs in the attic is the crowd cheering when they hear the words "masturbate" and "pot" in "captain jack"

Billy knows his audience

ums, thanks for mentioning "Scarecrow" - both as an entry in the category that I'd forgotten about, and also kind of a counter to my argument. Melonhead's vocal is rather more anguished than Billy's.

Billy chews and spits "every child had a pretty good SHOT!" but Johnny fairly screams "the FARMERS BANK FORECLOSED!"

Of course the clanking industrial rhythm of the opener is another McCartney nod, “Silly Love Songs” opens the same way.

I remember how weird this album was to me when it came out - my parents were massive fans and we had waited an eternity since Glass Houses for a new album. And then I saw it in the racks and it looked like a move poster (THE KILLING FIELDS maybe) and BJ looked pretty odd on the back and there was obviously something pretty adult and high concept in the track titles. Took me a long time to get into it. He no longer seemed fun.

*movie poster, ach

lol yes

I’m making it up in retrospect - KF came out in 1984. But the cover looked like a TIME magazine or something I guess.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d3/The_Onion_Field.jpg/220px-The_Onion_Field.jpg

Ha, no. I'll accept it.

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

https://i.imgur.com/u8OPmpJ.jpg

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.b4ZfA5gQ0c8IxA1Pm3StAgDIEs%26pid%3D15.1&f=1

d'oh xp

Also - just looked this up!

The Nylon Curtain
Released September 23, 1982

Nebraska
Released September 30, 1982

^^ Columbia Records radio guys must have done a lot of drinking that month.

it is 100 percent an "80s oscar movie" aesthetic. lotta boomers trying to find what looked right as "grown up" and "serious statement" I think. i mean without the cover, just from the iron-curtain pun title, you'd think we were in for some jokey 70s bullshit but with that font it feels like a monumental pronouncement on the quiet miseries of Adult Marriage and Divorce.

loving the allentown discussion. feel like this would be an easy song to clown, oh look at this faux-empathy, but clearly at least some of the ppl he was writing about found something meaningful in the song. i believe billy HAD worked in a factory btw - tho not for long and not in a steel mill. still I'm sure that helped. must have been a lot of places in long island that also had that ghost-town quality.

reminded me of this

http://movies2.nm-unlimited2.net/1980s/Graphics-Photos/milagro_beanfield_poster.jpg

Wasn't expecting The Killing Fields to come up until at least Thursday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALp9rfnPJ8c

Laura, tale of another femme fatale - or a mothering queen of the harpies - sounds to my ears like it's in the style of some other band. Darned if I could guess which one.

There should be an album of outtakes/sessions from The Nylon Curtain called "Expos Top Punchless Mets"

He sound awful on "Laura."

maybe he's trying to find an aural equivalent to the awfulness of the General Hospital character

this song has never worked for me. i like the sound and tempo on the verses - this weirdly metallic and mechanical take on the source material. but when it hits the choruses it has that "i wish this was a few BPM faster" problem - just plodding and grunting his way through. i'm spinning my finger in the air, okay, okay, we get it, wrap this up and move on... presumably this was purposeful, to capture the frustration and grind of this relationship but in general i only like joel's attempts at biting angry edgy vocals as an accent in the midst of verses. the lyric also just bores me, here's another jerk lady he's going to tell us about at great length. zzz.

The first song I ever heard with an F-bomb in it. Thanks, Obama Billy!

Plodding and lyrically uninteresting, but the F-bomb sure catches me off guard.

( best swearing on a track? )
i believe it's still my job to chime in all threads in which pleasant plains mentions billy joel, so i will continue my streak here to argue that "laura" is one of the all-time worst AND all-time best examples of swearing in a song. best, because unlike most of the others above, it was fully unexpected and at least a little bit transgressive. worst, because of the way he over-enunciates it, as if to draw attention to how transgressive and unexpected and just plain fucking silly it is.

― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, November 11, 2008 9:49 AM

FCC is right, though I would argue that the over enunciation of it to draw attention to the transgression of it all also makes it the best example of someone saying "fucking" in the middle of a pop song.

Also, back in the day when Rolling Stone featured two-page ad spreads on records you could order from Columbia House, it was always funny to see Nylon Curtain with a little '‡' next to it for "explicit lyrics".

― ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ ⊂⊃ (Pleasant Plains), Thursday, November 13, 2008 12:50 PM

Then these careless fingers
They get caught in her vice
Til they're bleeding
On my coffee table

Those are some wild lyrics, but the weird thing is, I automatically know it's one of those square slate metal coffee tables and not the wooden kind with the the carved rings around it like mine.

this song is v weird

seems to finally find its purpose in the guitar solo/bridge just to return to the okay verse/...is that a chorus? i can't tell, sounds like he's pushing the song uphill. prime sisyphean billy i guess

genuinely love the production on the record so far though, kind of a combo of the lushness of the stranger and the bite of glass houses; the piano sounds real glassy and brittle but the guitars are so warrrrm. very abbey road

whoops this song is stuck in my head now :\

sounds to my ears like it's in the style of some other band

If I had to blurt out a band instinctively, it would be 10cc, but I can't explain why.

that little guitar solo is very very george harrison. the call-and-response backing vox are very very beatles, too, and i assume the raw-sounding lead vocal and the attempt to transgress are the first of a few attempts on this album to channel john lennon. the piano intro and outro are meant as reminders, i assume, that this is in fact a billy joel song. i forgot how long and plodding it is. five minutes, feels like 10. the weird transparent vocal punch-ins ("suddenly,""immunized," etc.) make me carsick.

ha yeah i was being a little sarcastic with my "some other band," but it was a silly joke. this is the most clear attempt at beatles-ness he ever put on record. or at the very least, a solo lennon track with george's guitar, paul's backing harmonies, and a couple of ringo's fills passing through the studio.

this is totally composed like it's supposed to be an outtake from Imagine or Plastic Ono Band except that it is 3 times longer than it should be, the lyrics suck, and there's no hook. the (v brief) guitar solo is a nice George homage but beyond that this is just ugly all the way around. Never heard it before.

God, I love Laura. I love this whole album to bits, but I love Laura in particular.

yeah it feels like Plastic Ono Band to me as well, maybe because of the negative vibe

i don’t hate it, i just dont really like listening to it?

i think tucked into the album as a whole it would pass by ok though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z5WdSL0BK0

Pressure, according to one interview with Billy that I listened to, is "about pressure." Got it! (He's elaborated more elsewhere on the pressure of writer's block, and looking back on financial pressures earlier in his career.)

If you're like me and grew up on the first-issue Greatest Hits, the album version (found in the clip above) may be a surprise; the single cut it down from 4:40 to 3:16 by eliminating several sections, beginning with the "don't ask for help" verse. I guess the label applied some.......... influence.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/PressureBillyJoel.jpg

As the album's lead single, it peaked at #20 in the US and #9 in Canada. The music video, focused mainly on water pressure and some Shatnerian emoting from BJ, sticks to the album length with a slightly different mix.

Lyrically, vocally and hook-wise, the New Wavey-est thing I've heard from Billy so far, but damn those synths are shrill. New Wave, particularly circa 1982, was far more minimal, and often much warmer sounding, than this.

Listen to this and "Shock the Monkey" back to back.

You used to call me paranoid.... MON-KEY!!

One of the first videos I remember seeing.

I mean, it's hard to keep up with the other videos it foreshadowed:

"Electric Avenue"
"Owner of a Lonely Heart"
"Synchronicity II"
Um, "Hot for Teacher"?

But I didn't realize that *cough* this video was released in 1978?

https://i.imgur.com/vTPJLgD.png

When the content becomes self-aware:

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

https://i.imgur.com/EeClVaJ.gif

Harry Truman, Doris Day...

So, Roger. What did you think of this one?

https://i.imgur.com/wMYqLCx.gif

"intersts"

"Why? cos it intersting"

Just checked WhoSampled for this one, and ha, never noticed his bio before.

https://i.imgur.com/OH55oSq.png

lol good catch on billy's age

I have always liked this song, and especially appreciate having the excised bits back in.

It's full of rhythmic trickery like the offbeat intro and a nifty call-and response motif ("PRESSURE / WHACK WHACK"). And lots of lyrical flourishes. "Peter Pan advice," "cosmic rationale." "Here you are, in the ninth..." is gr8.

Agree that the synth sound grates. Reminds me a bit of Genesis's "Man on the Corner" in places. There are times when the PRESSURE sounds a bit like it might be bowel pressure rather than existential pressure, but that's Bill being Bill.

The lyric "you have no scars on your face / and you cannot handle pressure" made a big impression on me as a young person. Especially hard on the heels of "You May Be Right" and "Don't Ask Me Why" and "Only the Good Die Young." Taken together, those lyrics all suggest that being streetwise, scrappy, tough, and battered by rough experiences is essential to navigating the adult world.

I know Bill was just making pop songs, but for me he was also defining an ethos.

the synth sound is verrrry abacab-era genesis, obv it made me fall in love with this song immediately

There was a UK radio DJ in the mid-80s who had a daily quiz called under pressure which featured a jingle that spliced the hook from this with Queen/Bowie's Under Pressure and Spandau Ballet's Chant No 1