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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5g75rHKecM

Scandinavian Skies, penultimate track and slightly psych-tinged epic, was inspired in part by Billy's bad experience trying heroin - or possibly acid - on a flight from Amsterdam to Stockholm. Not released as a single, it apparently enjoyed some minor AOR airplay.

why the fuck would you decide a good time to try either of those things was before getting on a flight?

i like surprises a lot

"surprises" and "scandianavian skies" are almost an alt universe billy imo; i mean in this universe he mostly worships and simulates the beatles instead of following that impulse into its own strange curves and digressions

anyway i think they're both great

I already didn't like "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."

why the fuck would you decide a good time to try either of those things was before getting on a flight?

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:23 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like surprises a lot

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:25 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thought you were answering your own question there for a sec.

Listening to this now instead of as a 9-year-old kid: Oh. This isn't a WWII song after all.

this song is okayish I think. too long, and not super hookful, but at least it's different. the queasy seasick strings make me think of nilsson again but i assume they were going for i am the walrus.... and certainly the (awful) effect on billy's vocal brings out a reedy lennon-ness.

Another adult observation: So I guess these cheesy lighting effects weren't really happening inside Nassau Coliseum after all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Cb3-c2REg&feature=youtu.be&t=50s

https://youtu.be/b7Cb3-c2REg?t=50s

this song is okayish I think. too long, and not super hookful, but at least it's different

that's sort of where i'm at. also it's nice for side two of a billy joel record feel like it's building toward something, instead of running out of ideas (even though it's probably still running out of ideas)

devitto is fuckin killing it in that live video

What I didn't expect to learn after reaching this point in the tread: Hall & Oates made excellent albums with wonderful album tracks from 1980-1984. I thought Joel would be at least as good.

whoops

at least the next album is full of bangers

Alfred otm this guy is a singles artist through and through

definitely

i don't think it's that he's strictly a singles artist (glass houses has plenty of good non-singles), i think it's more that he just never had a lot of material. he wasn't an album tracks artist, per se, simply because he didn't produce a whole lot of tracks.

i thought this from upthread was otm:

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

hall & oates, like petty, strike me as the kind of artists for whom writing songs was like breathing. an essential part of who they were and what they did. all the time. the gracefulness almost built into the process. whereas billy struggled for nearly every one. i can't imagine he had a whole lot of tracks to choose from for any given album. there are some good singles, some good non-singles, some bad singles, some bad non-singles, but not a whole lot of leftovers and lost moments.

which, i don't know, is maybe just a different way of saying he's pretty much a singles artist through and through, with a handful of great non-singles.

Also, Daryl Hall is one of hth great white R&B voices ever, so even when the songs were negligible he had the voice.

truth

Yeah, as I've said before, a Billy who made half as many albums (with twice as many hits each) would not be Billy.

And he would likely not have been a viable recording artist in this period of music history. So he is what he is.

Would be interesting to know if he or anyone at the label thought "Surprises" could be a hit, or if it's more a songwriting exercise. That one and "Zanzibar" both are almost proggy in their ambitious changes.

I was looking forward to this one, and listening for what must be the first time in 30 years I realise maybe I like this more than the rest of the album, tho Laura and Saigon are on par. I’m a little stunned at how blatant the Waltus pastiche is - he must have wanted to respond to Lennon’s death I guess. But yeah this is slinky and queasy and cryptic and menacing, I remember trying to decode it as a kid and feeling there was a lot I didn’t get.

Argh, Walrus

I am the Waltus

goo GOO JOOB____ ... goo GOO JOOB______

the (awful) effect on billy's vocal brings out a reedy lennon-ness

there are moments here ("the tour of ger-MAH-neeee") where i would swear the vocal was being autotuned. what did phil ramone know in 1982 that nobody else knew?

Phasing gives that modulating effect on the timbre of the voice that sounds like autotune. Another very Lennon thing to do ("let's run it through Ken's flanger").

i've always understood the nylon curtain to be billy's attempt to (re)assert himself as a serious artiste after waking up one morning and realizing he was a pop star. circa 1982, channeling psychedelia-era beatles would have been one obvious way to do that, even without the john lennon news cycle the world had just lived through. i hear "surprises," "scandinavian skies," "laura" and probably "goodnight saigon" as the heart of the album he was trying to make, whereas the hits constituted the somewhat different album he'd be remembered for making, which as a (more or less) singles artist (and pop star) is kind of hard to avoid.

(and thanks, vampire!)

Released the same year, let's point out, as Donald Fagen's The Nightfly, another album by a boomer glancing backward.

What Joel said at the time:

People my age, 25 to 40, who grew up as Cold War babies, we don't have anybody writing music for us. There's a lot of formula rock aimed at the 11-year-old market, and there's a lot of MOR for people over 50. But this is an album dealing with us, and our American experience--guilt, pressures, relationships, and the whole Vietnam syndrome."

Boomers, the neglected generation

If only they had a media landscape to themselves

hey man at the time they had only just started voting for Reagan, relax

Fact checker OTM re the album makeup.

Οὖτις, lol.

When I told my mother (b. 1943) that I (b. 1971) was going to a Billy Joel concert with my girlfriend (b. 1973), my mother said - and I quote - "Hmph! Get a generation."

n.b. that was in 1989 (Storm Front tour)

listening to "scandinavian skies" again it really is kinda cool... like even without the effects and textures it feels different from most of his catalog.

as we saw on the last album and I think even moreso on the next, writing "in the style of" really does seem to help him out on writer's block and only really goes wrong when the style he picks just sounds incredibly forced in his vocal chords (all those leon russell/joe cocker numbers). what I'm saying is that he should have issued an allentown/pressure double A side and then made an entire album of beatles tributes --- this is me trying to do "revolution 9," this is me trying to do "I wanna be your man"... i'm guessing the songs would have just poured out, versus "this is me trying to make an important and respected LP" which has some real highs but also some very dodgy filler when he doesn't actually have much to say.

Doc, out of curiosity, which do you think are his "joe cocker numbers"?

oh man theyre all the ones i already don't remember. would need to load whole thread and do some searching. "ain't no crime" and all that.

Oh, Lord. Why did I search that.

https://i.imgur.com/mXU3ciK.jpg

"A Room of Our Own": really uninspired song. the chorus barely sounds like one, and even the solo is weak

"Surprises": reminds me a lot of mid-period Split Enz, when their writing was still a little meandering and weird, but moving towards conventional. That's not a bad thing though, it's a decent song. Though I doubt Billy was inspired by Split Enz. Probably both artists are drawing from the same older sources

"Scandinavian Skies": I was about halfway through when I was thinking "the only thing missing is Mellotron". And of course he uses it near the end. This is true pastiche, but it's not bad. The strings do a lot of heavy lifting in this song - they are most of what I like about it

With one song left, gotta say, this album is pretty bad. One of the worst overall

<SPOILER> but we're going to get another reprise!</SPOILER>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX3nFG6Js-Y

Where's the Orchestra? closes The Nylon Curtain. It might also be called "where's the band," as the regulars don't appear here - just Billy, some chamber musicians, and saxophone work by Eddie Daniels, a jazz vet who'd appeared on some previous Ramone records and will also be heard on the next few Billy albums.

A nice little finish, and again, very Nilsson-esque to my ears.

i've always understood the nylon curtain to be billy's attempt to (re)assert himself as a serious artiste after waking up one morning and realizing he was a pop star. circa 1982, channeling psychedelia-era beatles would have been one obvious way to do that, even without the john lennon news cycle the world had just lived through. i hear "surprises," "scandinavian skies," "laura" and probably "goodnight saigon" as the heart of the album he was trying to make, whereas the hits constituted the somewhat different album he'd be remembered for making, which as a (more or less) singles artist (and pop star) is kind of hard to avoid.

(and thanks, vampire!)

― fact checking cuz, Tuesday, October 17, 2017 10:30 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is totally OTM. I think I love this album more because than in spite of the fact that its Billy making his Serious Album Artist Album, and while I think it ultimately "fails" in that ambition, I think it does it in very interesting ways. Also this cassette was permanently in the family car, and my dad would put Goodnight Saigon on the mix tapes we'd take on holiday, so I was brainwashed with this album at a very early age and it probably skewed my critical parameters somewhat. But I do love that self-conscious "albumness", and when, as an 8-year-old, I realised it ended with the elegiac retread of the Allentown melody, it blew my mind.

Weird song. The lyric is awkward, like he's making it up as he goes along. The closing "Allentown" reprise is lovely.

I'd say it's his Serious Dad Album

As this thread progresses, I'm looking forward to a transition from mostly-childhood reminiscences to more adolescent and young-adult reminiscences.

My parents were too old and snobbish for these records, so I don't have the memories others do of parents having these records. They reached me anyway. But it's interesting how many comments have been about our childhood impressions, childhood misunderstandings of the lyrics, etc. What will happen when we get to the 90s, when we heard new Joel stuff as more fully formed people?

Oh we'll be shameless.

Disappointing Prince Vaults Found To Contain 37,000 Hours Of Billy Joel Covers https://t.co/xagWWhSywH pic.twitter.com/FFvjwBAewx

— The Onion (@TheOnion) October 18, 2017