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

I'm sure I've heard another one, but can't think of it. I can think of "Pink Cigarette" by Mr. Bungle, but that's more a "99 bottles of beer" style countdown

Count-UP isn't it?

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

She's Right On Time opens side two as if eager to turn away from all this talk of pressure, disenfranchised workers and lives wasted in the madness of Vietnam. Billy has described it as his version of a Christmas song. Though not a single in the US, it got a release in the Netherlands, I assume based on the success "Goodnight Saigon" had there. The video, which I never knew existed, lets Billy try his hand at slapstick even has he faces situations arguably more alarming than those we saw in "Pressure."

https://img.discogs.com/N6w4fGZPaKZSR9E-HxZhonVpkpU=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-7237923-1436868364-5156.jpeg.jpg

God, that's awful. Generic MOR.

Sometimes in my head I conflate "She's Right on Time" with "That's Not Her Style," possibly because they scan the same and I normally give exactly no thought to either song.

On relistening the only thing I like about this is the arpeggiated guitar in the beginning, playing what would ordinarily have been done on piano; it's a refreshing change. I find myself hoping it will keep going that way, but then by the second chorus that thread is lost and we're back in wall-to-wall pyannoville.

Maybe #57 on one's life list of Jewish Christmas songs.

Moreso than anything we've heard so far, this feels, with hindsight, like "Billy Joel is READY FOR THE EIGHTIES," with the new wave interzone behind us. I can't point to the exact specific features that give it that feeling of a digital arena lightshow number, but somehow it feels less like another stylistic experiment/digression and more like "okay, this is what pop-rock Billy sounds like now." Thankfully (imho) that's not what we're in for QUITE yet. But despite a basically catchy chorus and an appealing sense of drama, this one never grabs me. Verse melody's monotonous and the bridge melody is still waiting to be found.

Yeah, there's nothing interesting here. Even Billy's singing is boring.

I think Just In Time might be one of Billy's own favourite songs, iirc

hahah doh Right On Time obvs

Whatevs, I love this song ... for what it is. My "Die Hard" entry on the list of favorite Christmas songs.

My step-brother had MTV while up in the woods, we were still twisting the aerial antenna on cloudy nights. He once told me about this Billy Joel video where Billy's waiting for this chick, but he keeps setting fire to his kitchen and having the blinds fall on him . I thought he was so full of shit because his word was like the only testimony to that video's existence for like 15 years. Finally, one night when M2 was still a thing, this video came on and ... I don't know, it was like seeing The Day the Clown Cried for the first time. You know, as if someone had told you about The Day the Clown Cried, but you said they were full of shit.

But I do love watching these old videos, checking out old cars, dated home interiors, and seeing how the street signs in NYC used to look:

https://i.imgur.com/26hsX5P.png

is that real street footage? the "skyscrapers" outside billy's windows made me think this was all LA backlot stuff...

omg this video. his videos really are something else. Anyone wanna take a stab at identifying what records he has in his apartment when that shelf collapses

loool @ "better hide the porn!" shot

Sounds like a halfway point between "Hysteria" and Christian rock.

"Billy Joel Speedwagon" I say

Just to briefly bring it back to 'Goodnight Saigon', I've always thought that in the last drum fill in the final chorus, the snare roll has the exact tempo and timbre of heavy machine gun fire. It may not have been intentional, but it adds to the drama for me. Great, great song.

i sorta like this song! even though it doesn't really work per se

the bridge is a lot of the reason why

also the arrangement is doing the majority of the work

Billy really makes some odd decisions regarding promo and 45 cover shots

God this is so Styx-ian

oh man the chorus has been stuck in my head all afternoon

the chorus has one of those melodies that sounds kinda off and tuneless, but I know will get stuck in my head this week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDZdNz7Wg0Y

Though the title of A Room Of Our Own might suggest a lazy reading of Virginia Woolf, it's actually a mars-and-venus ode to separate spheres. It is a song on this record.

This certainly a Billy Joel song that exists

I'm pretty pissed at Billy for the failure of nerve these last two songs represent

otm

yeah I feel like there's a real writer's block thing with just a few tracks on this album, and they end up really undermining the bigger and more complete things, as well as the notion that this is some deep Statement album. billy's songs tend to come off as effortless or very very effortful.

this is his New Jersey isn't it

nope! next album is a smash.

we actually struggled a great deal with his new jerseyness back in the day. the ones that match up in terms of high chart performance followed by seeming hollow and nobody cares about them are "the bridge" and "storm front" but neither really had "event" status in the first place and when you only put out one more album and then retire it's sort of hard to measure "career decline.". i think he doesn't have one.

pressure – i always heard this as billy singing to himself about writer's block. which manifests literally when the bridge comes around for a second time and he can't come up with any words for the first half of it (i.e. the two missing lines before "all your life is time magazine"). i like this song more than i used to. there's some really good singing here, and the writing and playing really does capture the anxiety he's singing about. it's a very very billy song that doesn't sound like any other billy songs. my favorite bit: the spoken-word "i'll tell you what it means." where else in his catalog does billy do that?

goodnight saigon – sometimes i think the universal, first-person-plural approach is smarmy and sometimes i think it's a perfect way to evoke the feeling of having to sacrifice everything including your identity. then he gets to "we would all go down together" and i stop worrying about any of that and realize it's both smarmy and great and it can still make me cry. this is as chilling as any line in any vietnam song: "they heard the hum of our motors / they counted the rotors / and waited for us to arrive."

she's right on time – god bless liberty for trying as hard as he does to find something to do here.

a room of our own – i have writer's block and i own some nilsson albums. this is one of those billy songs i never remember exists.

btw: man, I'm loving this thread. thanks again y'all.

i'm already struggling to remember the tune to rooms of our own. keep winding up at other, better songs built around this same lame theme, like alan jackson's "blue blooded woman." or even "the dangling conversation."

Been looking forward to this day for almost ten years now: a lol of our own

lol

The moderately blues-y, sorta old time-y rock 'n' roll homage is my least favourite kind of Billy Joel song, and this is that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdqAeRjel4

Surprises was inspired by Joel's motorcycle accident and his collapsing marriage. The Internet rustles with Lennon comparisons, but to my ears it sounds like a very focused attempt at a Nilsson song.

this is his New Jersey isn't it

― sleeve, Saturday, October 14, 2017 1:11 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nope! next album is a smash.

― Doctor Casino, Saturday, October 14, 2017 1:12 PM

the decade ends with his biggest album of the '80s.

yeah, i really don't think he has one. more like a stones career if they'd just retired suddenly in the early 90s. all commercially successful, none that obviously marks them going off a cliff, none that even hardcore fans would suggest belong in their career-spanning top five.

This isn't bad if self-consciously "adult," with DeVito saving the day.

(tbf though no way is 'storm front' bigger than 'an innocent man,' at least in the US - 4x platinum versus 7x, two top 40 hits versus five...)

oh for some reason I thought AIM was 4x platinum too -- my bad.

AIM was given the Thriller treatment.

Another snoozefest. Side B of TNC is really letting me down so far, particularly considering how I'd been long led to believe (mostly by C**** K*********) that this was, along with Glass Houses, one of the more solid Billy albums.

Thinking again how Springsteen’s Nebraska came out a week after this, if this were a more focused recession album those could have been more of a one-two punch.

Also, I’ve been waking up with these songs in my head more than any past listening thread. Still waking up to “Close to the Borderline” most mornings.

I like that filthy plucked bass in "A Room..." That's it. It's not terrible, but he can't resist thinking the chick needs yoga while he needs beer.

I still think this album's pretty solid - 'A Room Of Our Own' is pretty rote (although it's better than Christie Lee from the next album), but I like 'She's Right On Time' and 'Surprises' a lot. I guess the big conceptual pieces are the singles, and the remainder is a bit less remarkable. But he captures a Beatles vibe pretty well.

Given the tenor of the times, he probably needed to release the albums he did, with the songs that are on them. He needed that pace to stay in the public eye (especially given his early hiatus). And the albums needed about this many songs to be viable in the marketplace.

That said, I wonder if his legacy would be any different if he'd just released the songs on the first sides of these albums. Almost all of our fave hits are on side 1. Some combination of Bill and the production staff must have had a pretty good sense of what would work as a hit.

But equally, it wouldn't have made sense for him to release half as many albums, with twice as many hits per album.

The Internet rustles with Lennon comparisons, but to my ears it sounds like a very focused attempt at a Nilsson song.

i hear both pretty strongly. with a little bach, maybe, thrown in on the instrumental break. i think it's a good, overt attempt at a genre song, a concept he'd take into high gear on his next album with much more fun genres. the lyric is a detail or two short of saying anything but it does set up a mood pretty nicely.

yeah that melody is total Nilsson, although it is not a particularly great Nilsson-esque melody.