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

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

https://frinkiac.com/img/S04E12/740539/medium.jpg

Popped into my local record shop and they've got two copies of this album in the new-arrivals bin, right next to each other! It's in the collective unconscious.

I think Billy favors the sound of words over the meaning - in the interviews that DC has posted, he said he usually comes up with the lyrics last. Obviously he's not going as far as Eno, but he's really good at choosing words that are memorable and fit his rhyme scheme, at the expense of a stupid line and mixed message here and there

basically fcc otm

However, he doesn't strike me as a lazy songwriter, even lyrically. I just think his priorities are more skewed towards sounding good than meaning good. Stupid lines are often among the most memorable in a song anyhow

otm

Stupid lines are often among the most memorable in a song anyhow

ha. and true. see also: billy's old tourmate elton john.

And Neil Diamond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7lpvVf2rCY

Sleeping With The Television On is one of my very favorite Joel deep cuts and has been stuck in my head almost every day since we started this album. Though another step into Costello/Jackson territory, it also arrives at something very much like peak-period Hall & Oates, which is more than okay by me. Whether he knew the Dictators' Sleepin' With the TV On, I cannot guess.

the only album track Christgau liked!

except for the rinky-dink organ it works though

"Tomorrow morning, you'll wake up to the white noise." <--- one of my favorite WMJ lines. Just how he ends the verse with it.

Have we used up all the sound effect intros on this album yet? Glass breaking, touch-tone telephone, Star-Spangled Banner... Roger Waters must've been sitting next to his speakers, tapping his front teeth with a biro, going "Hmm. This guy's good."

And what are we going to use when we record our cover? The sound of the OnDemand menu blaring about La La Land available now! in the New Movies section?

Keyboard solo definitely EC. But it's all pretty tight. Liberty DeVitto should've been pretty happy with the way this one turned out.

For real my favorite or second-favorite track on this album. This veers straight into power-pop territory -- replace all the keyboards with guitars and I could imagine this being a track from Cheap Trick or the Real Kids. And he knows exactly what the song needs, too, with the major verses/choruses and relative minor bridges. It's right out of the Beatles handbook.

One of the best drum parts evah. I love the stab guitar and the sideways open-hat stuff (like under "just for the night ^ boys ^ ^"). One definitely hears Costello and Jackson.

otm on drumming and stab guitar

key hook for me is the way billy's lyric saves most of its syllables until it's going over the "all night long" backing vox, it's like sleater-kinney's intertwined guitar lines or something. obv this is also where liberty really shines with those high-speed fills.

What a jam - this might beat out "All for Leyna" for best new find. I love songs that are so efficient - intro, verses, choruses, TWO iterations of the bridge, solo, outro - there's a lot packed into 3:05! "Locked Out of Heaven" basically uses the same intro as this song, and it was a good steal on Bruno's part

I feel like this is just the right AMOUNT of the Star-Spangled Banner too -- starting on the "and" creates this tension that's not really resolved until Billy starts singing.

I loved this when this album came out and I don't think I knew what powerpop WAS then. Now I get it and agree he's going for that.

Damn I love the way he delivers "It just might be somebody else's same old line" on the second go-round. When he's literally repeating a line! In fact it's more like "It j-just" -- never noticed he STAMMERS that line the second time!

I really never realized how MUCH of Joel's shtick is writing songs that sound like love songs but are actually about how much of a hopeless schnook he is and how he hates himself, with the woman's role less as love object and more as living proof.

OK but not to keep hammering on this theme of cross-referencing Joel with Joe Jackson, but compare "Sleeping with The Television On" with "Is She Really Going Out WIth Him?" Again, the Jackson song is way way better, sorry, Billy, but is also more sour than mean. In Joel there's a sense that the woman MIGHT want to talk to you if only you had more guts and weren't sitting home alone and scared. For Jackson, there's really no point, no reason to encourage his narrator to "Tell Her About It" -- the woman is always gonna go off with the asshole anyway. When Jackson says "I can't seem to say or do the right thing" he means something is wrong with the OTHER person -- when Joel can't come up with words that aren't "somebody else's same old line," he's sincerely criticizing himself.

I kind of want to bring Fountains of Wayne "Leave the Biker" into this but I've got to go to a meeting.

There's a clip where he calls "I really wish I was less of a thinking man, and more a fool who's not afraid of rejection" the "key line" of the song. It's telling, I think, that it's a line concerning the speaker rather than Diane. This is one where I think he's *aware* of how the woman in the song, her supposed loneliness and sad TV-sleeping fate, are less a real person dancing at the club and more a projection in the mind of the man. Definite shades of Jackson in that approach, and more interesting than the superficially similar "I'll tell you how into it she really is" approach on "You May Be Right." I hear the comparison to "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" but idk, they're different stories, capturing slightly different moments/feelings/characters.

above should say "more sour and mean" not "more sour than mean"

this is okay, def a slightly smoother take on Cheap Trick or similar to my ears. Agree that the organ sound is rinky-dink and the weakest part, weird that they just didn't get a better sound out of the farfisa or vox or whatever they were using.

tbf, it was the style at the time!

(see e.g. "Pump It Up" which is surely the kind of thing Joel was thinking about whenever he talked about recognizing garage-rock in new wave. nothing on this album has either the heaviness or the swing of that song, both of which maybe give the organ sound a different feel in-context, but the actual tone on the instrument is i think pretty similar.)

i love this song

does this album totally fall apart at the end like the stranger? bc at the moment it's my favorite billy joel record

I can't imagine he has a better record in his catalog

this snarky new wave bubblegum style is his best by default to my ears - camouflages his weaknesses and highlights his strengths imo

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.

― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, September 26, 2017 3:27 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

great post

ultimately, i imagine billy - at core - is a guy at a piano who happened upon a great little piano figure or chord change and keeps grinding on it to see if he can spin it into a song