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

that part is poignant, agreed

Veg, right. FWIW "The Longest Time" is much more relatable lyrically than "An Innocent Man."

I mean, most of us - at any age! - can connect with "you're neat and I want to hold you" better than the contortions of "you keep sabotaging yourself because of past emotional traumas, but I am willing to wait through that because I'm not the one who hurt you."

Also look at the shifting attitudes toward innocence and experience. Compare the brash streetwise youths of "Only the Good Die Young"/"You May Be Right"/"Angry Young Man" with the knowing-adult "I am an Innocent Man" with the goofily-happy bit here: "Once I thought my innocence was gone, now I know that happiness goes on."

A Joel for all seasons.

yay welcome back veg, you have been missed!

<3 lol it’s good to be home!

Although this is a fight I can lose / the accused... is my favorite. He could have flogged the trial metaphor but doesn't.

mine too.

i absolutely unreservedly unabashedly unashamedly looooooove "the longest time." a perfect, spot-on study of a form that stands on its own, completely apart from its spot-onness.

i never noticed the hall connection either!

love puffin's post on the blurred lines. billy was really on his compositional A-game throughout this album.

my favorite thing is the shifting use of “longest time”

that hasnt happened for the longest time
i havent been there for the longest time
i intend to hold you for the longest time

<3

This.

I love this song in a completely uncomplicated way. As Pauline Kael wrote once about E.T., "it seems to clear all the bad thoughts out of your head." You are all free to hate it, of course--I probably hate any number of sentimental pop love songs that many of you hold dear--but there's something about hating this song that feels nearly akin to hating a puppy.

Few songs put a smile on my face faster than this song, and unless I'm like, in a meeting with my boss, I will be singing along. The arrangement has so much detail but he makes it seem effortless

Joel does it INSIDE A SYLLABLE with "For the longest/I'm that voice you're hearing in the hall."

The ending "t" of "longest" turns the word "I'm" into "time," which is coincidentally in the title of the song

Have not been able to stop thinking about this.

And we thought "you're the one I depend upOOOONNNNNNNNESTY, IS SUCH A LONLEY WORD....." was crazy.

Childhood mishearing watch: "I'm that voice" was "I'm back, boys." I think it felt like something the motorcycle-gangster Billy would say, incongruous as it might be for this song.

lol this might be weird to admit but this song gives me a Sesame Street vibe too, reminds me of that Shangrila’s throwback they did with “One Way”

this might be my favorite song of his

it's pretty rare to have this combination of perfect craft, detail, and minimal arrangement, the only other thing I can think of right now that comes close is "Kiss"

yeah i've been listening to this all day and i think i've fallen in love with this song for the first time, having previously disliked it for, ahem, the longest time, and before that having been enchanted with it as a kid without being able to place the song stylistically or temporally

what a melody, really

do late 80’s & 90’s kids just intrinsically have a bad kneejerk reaction to the 50’s throwback?

i always wondered why ppl dismissed it so readily

anyway i like this

https://youtu.be/1nR0dkiHEW8

also Billy did doo wop duty on the backing vocals for one of my alltime fave Cyndi Lauper songs “Maybe He’ll Know”

https://youtu.be/IDWZR1_S7Js

Could be that late 80s/90s kids just have less exposure to Billy Joel on account of being less likely to have boomer parents... I suspect they probably have less of a relationship to "A Christmas Story" as well but this is just a personal pet theory.

do late 80’s & 90’s kids just intrinsically have a bad kneejerk reaction to the 50’s throwback?

This is very much a Johnny Rockets-era album.

I find it so hard to grasp that the early 60s are only twenty years before the early 80s. I mean, the late 90s feel plenty far away from me but maybe not THAT far away. Probably everybody ends up feeling this way of course - our lives are gradual unfolding day by day stories, our parents' lives are a series of anecdotes punctuating a wide and epic tapestry of generational touchstones and transformations.

The really weird thing is how little difference there is between stuff recorded in the late 90s vs now imo (compared to the vast sonic gulf separating the 80s and 60s)

The video portrays him as a member of the Class of '59 at his 25th reunion. A 35-year-old playing a 43-year-old.

This of course would be the equivalent today of someone born in 1982 playing a member of the Class of 1992 (of which I am a member.)

All of that discovered and pondered about today as I tried to match 43-year-old Billy's hair with the gray bouffant he wears in the video. Despite having dated Elle Macpherson and marrying Christie Brinkley, he didn't have much on top by 1992.

However, today in 2017, I've still got a full head of hair. It's more than I could ask for.

and it's more than I HOPED for

Plains, right! Forgot that he used the same trick in Honesty.

I keep thinking Daryl Hall would slay this, and, as Casino reminded us yesterday, Hall & Oates attempted this sort of thing. But Hall's specialty isn't warmth.

And he's gonna be a father again!

I keep thinking Daryl Hall would slay this

Hmmm, maybe that lyric then should be "I'm that voice you're hearing in the Hall."

I'm that Oates competing with the Hall
As to who will cover Billy Joel
My take's more earnest
Though my voice ain't the schönest
Now please excuse us for the slanted rhymes

Hi all...haven't caught up with Innocent Man yet because Glass Houses/Nylon Curtain had been kinda bugging me, so anyway here is my best attempt The Glass Curtain, a combo of both albums to create the ultimate Billy goes new wave album

https://open.spotify.com/user/matthelgeson/playlist/2ON4y88t2GseUq3OwjLxH6

I can't officially bless it, but going out with Sleeping/Goodnight is inspired.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvDvVu-Jzo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRvDvVu-Jzo

This Night is the big slow-dance number, inspired by Elle Macpherson and released as a single overseas to middling returns. In the UK it got a deluxe gatefold single treatment, apparently intended as a romantic stocking-stuffer. Huh.

If the chorus melody seems somehow un-Joelish, that may be because - per the liner notes - he was working with a cowriter, one "L. v. Beethoven." Nice of Billy to give the guy a leg up.

https://img.discogs.com/zlWcSabePpGkSFFicvbhJWDVL04=/fit-in/488x484/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1255202-1313215427.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/U-6XJVUFT_RGB1hCcFz6KNdVCg0=/fit-in/600x605/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-8472217-1462278776-4500.jpeg.jpg

https://img.discogs.com/s0VGJsoK2vV3J__ilAOXvO2qqp0=/fit-in/437x440/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-5241377-1388689250-5773.jpeg.jpg https://img.discogs.com/4QtcU28uOVD36Noww_xn3yRSj5U=/fit-in/459x451/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-5241377-1388689277-1032.jpeg.jpg

That Beethoven guy didn't need Billy's help - he'd cowritten a hit song with that exact same tune for Louise Tucker just the year before

Wow, what a hack! Did he think no one would notice?

If, as someone pointed out yesterday, "The Longest Time" sounds like it could have come from the actual heyday of doo-wop twenty or thirty years prior, "This Night" sounds very much like an 80s take on the genre. I don't hate it, but its easily the least memorable AIM track up to this point.

I could see hearing the shoop-shoo-wahs as somehow a little more affected and winking, but for me it totally works. That chorus melody really does a lot of work!

I do wish it were "This night is ours" even if that throws away the "mine / I" rhyme. Everything else about it is a just-we-two kind of thing, time stops around us, this night can last forever. "This night is mine" makes him sound like Conan the Barbarian.

I can hear the lamentations of the women

I mean, did the Stray Cats get pissed that someone else was pulling the whole retro thing?

It's a pretty song.

Sting would pull the ol' borrow-from-the-dead trick later on his own album:

https://i.imgur.com/CnYX3em.png

Stray Cats came out of a totally different scene - they're contemporaries/immediate predecessor were people like X and the Gun Club and the Cramps

Built For Speed was #2 behind Business as Usual for 15 weeks. Clearly 'Happy Days' were here again.

huh I had no idea the Stray Cats went the Pretenders/Hendrix "let's move to the UK!" success route

Stray Cats couldn't really be that pissed, right? 1950s retro was just in the air, in part because of Boomer demographics obviously. Postmodernist aesthetics got really into postwar suburban kitsch as much or more than they did premodern classicism. We touched on this a bit in that 1985 paint splatter/Keith Haring squiggle-art/polka dot/loud color street style (Memphis Group, Pee Wee's Playhouse, B-52s) but there may be another thread more specifically on that. Hmmm... revisionist doo-wop has a bit on Billy as does Tributes to 50s Rock’n’Roll and Doo Wop by Rockers form the late 60s and early 70s (A List) though both are more interested in a 60s/70s thing. Basically there's a case that some of these sounds never went away, but there is something in the 80s where they stop being novelty tracks buried in the deep cuts, and become singles and in this case a whole album.

i can see the polecats or the blasters being pissed at the stray cats, but i can't see the stray cats being pissed at anybody.

ah the Blasters!!! knew I was forgetting someone crucial from my list

OK! The Stray Cats were cool with it!

were Seven Mary Three pissed at Pearl Jam?

I know I was!

>:(

lol

Twisted Sister released the follow-up to their 1984 smash Stay Hungry. Come Out and Play was, well, it was not particularly great. While the album was popular enough to go gold, it didn’t quite have the hits that the previous album had and was reportedly one of the first CDs to go out of print. You can get a hint of the direction of the album from its lead single, a cover of the 60s girl group the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack.”

The multi-platinum success of Stay Hungry led the band to go for broke and take a shot at the mainstream with “Be Chrool To Your Scuel.” As the headline references, not only did the band recruit fellow Long Islander Billy Joel to play piano on the track, they also called in Alice Cooper, who’d also written his own anthem about school. Bruce Springsteeen saxophonist Clarence Clemons, Stray Cats guitarist Brian Setzer and the Uptown Horns, were among the others that played on the track.

Never even heard of this! Sub-Meat-Loaf!

http://www.metalinsider.net/news/today-in-metal-twisted-sister-team-up-with-billy-joel-alice-cooper-for-come-out-and-play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWAJG71Urbw