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

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

So I can never hear this song without hearing those songs to

this song is obv very OTT and ridiculous from a certain vantage point. cartoonishly so with the PRESHAH!!! and the wisely-chopped-from-the-single "i'll tell you what it means....". the synths seem intended to evoke norman bates arriving in the shower. and you'll have to deal with PSY-CHO!!!! none of that bothered me as a kid, and yeah, I really responded to the scary streetwise vibe. very much the way The City looked in movies at that point. he's getting closer to the borderline.

what makes it work for me as an adult, aside from the tremendous hookiness of the chorus riff and the pre-chorus vocal, is that billy's baseline judginess and resentment means that even if some of the vocal moves seem just a little affected and forced, the attitude never does: this is totally a guy who sees himself surrounded by phonies who fold under pressure, no scars on their faces (nor broken noses or motorcycle accidents) dispensing "peter pan advice" (best line in the song). it's a tad monotonous as in many "you're so dumb" songs - but I guess just going on and on about pressure does, in a way, give us the sense of rising pressure, which the music certainly supports.

childhood mishearing watch: I figured "psych one, psych two" was some variant on the "Yeah, I'll be there for that... PSYCH!!!" slang, or maybe some way of indicating a series of mental traumas - shock the first, shock the second. I also took "sesame street, what does it mean?" to be a genuine question from a baffled oldster, rather than the dismissive "yeah, so what?" that comes off more clearly in the Time Magazine version on the album. apparently he really wanted to take a dig at the serious arty adult programming on PBS but couldn't resist Sesame Street, which works lyrically anyway - you live in a childish, rose-colored view of street life, BUT YOU WILL COME, TO A PLACE... etc.

also: "I'm sure you have some cosmic wraaath... shuuut uuuuup"

Our Channel 13 was nothing but static. All your life is static!

We didn't have a channel 13 and I guess I thought he was singing "shadow 13," which is also meaningless but I thought it was some kind of grownup thing.

it's specifically the new-york-area PBS station - would have been a different number in other broadcast markets. for non-norteamericanos, public broadcasting, in addition to educational children's fare like sesame street and mr. rogers, would run adult nonfiction stuff like science, nature and history shows, and french cooking from julia child and colette rossant. i believe that it was also the entry point for bbc imports like monty python but probably also more stuffy, period-drama fare in addition to ballets, opera, and classical music.

this song does that quintessential Billy Joel thing where one of the instruments (usually Joel's piano) is banging out straight 8th notes all the way through while other instruments shift around where the downbeat/emphasis is. I believe this juxtaposition is meant to represent "complexity".

but I find it pretty irritating.

There is nothing about this song I don't love. It's my favorite Joel song and always has been since I first heard.

it.

Also made a good bumper going into the bottom-of-the-hour break.

Laura is great, so far his Beatles pastiches have generally be McCartneyesque this leans towards Lennon

Pressure I remember so vividly as a kid, it seemed so weird and intense to me, cornfields post-punk I guess

it's ridiculous but it works

though I have to say, like everyone been listening to a lot of Tom Petty lately and the graceful, easy way his best songs have does make me like Billy's try-hard piano lesson kid I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow yr house down thing a little less

Pressure is def Billy on 11

I do love that the synth parts are this mix of minor and diminished chords that resolve solidly into major for the verses, then he re-visits them again to get back to the chorus without making it sound quite so tense until the next instrumental break. He uses a lot of passing tones in this one, too.

this song does that quintessential Billy Joel thing where one of the instruments (usually Joel's piano) is banging out straight 8th notes all the way through while other instruments shift around where the downbeat/emphasis is. I believe this juxtaposition is meant to represent "complexity".

but I find it pretty irritating.

^^^ cannot handle "Pressure"

wow they really chopped the shit out of the Greatest Hits version, huh.

this song makes me think of interpretive dance and the "Oh Industry" song from Beaches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpX80Soj44M

also this is definitely one of those songs that sounded VERY ADULT to my child-ears
loaded guns? in my face? O_O
and singing about stuff like Peter Pan and Sesame Street but he sounded so MAD about them which I found very confusing

it's specifically the new-york-area PBS station -

Love this line, because in Minneapolis we called our local PBS station "Channel 2."