Music Video Of the Week - March 8, 2024

"Piano Man" by Billy Joel  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - May 6, 2022

"Everybody Loves You Now" by Billy Joel  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Music Video Of the Week - May 31, 2019

"It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" by Billy Joel  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Just The Way She Is

Hillary Clinton, I'm sure, is a Billy Joel fan.

  

I may be wrong, for all I know, but I may be right.

And what led me to that conclusion?

Billy Joel is indeed a talented singer-songwriter, though he tends to be simultaneously underrated by the critics and overrated by his fans.  But in their 1991 book "The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time," Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell called to my attention an annoying quirk Joel has.  Occasionally, he has written lyrics in his songs that are phrased to deflect blame to others.  Guterman and O'Donnell gave two examples.  One was "You May Be Right," in which Joel's narrator sings about the crazy, insane things he's done, from riding his motorcycle in the rain to walking through the predominantly black Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant by himself (accidental racism?), and explains to the woman he's addressing that she's made him do all of that ("If I'm crazy, then it's true / That it's all because of you").  Another was "We Didn't Start The Fire," Joel's list of postwar historical events that attempted to show Generation Xers that the world wasn't really a better place in the 1950s, in which the refrain insists that Baby Boomers tried to fight the fire of human history while denying any Boomer responsibility for adding fuel to the flames.

I found two more on my own.  In "She's Always a Woman," Joel sings about a woman who's capable of all sorts of malice and blames it not on the woman but on the second party he's singing to - "Blame it all on yourself."  (The song, to be fair, was written about his then-wife Elizabeth's negotiating skills and how she used them to get Joel out of bad business deals.)   Two years after Guterman's and O'Donnell's book came out, Joel released his River of Dreams LP, whose song "The River of Dreams" featured the following lyric: "And I've been searching for something / Taken out of my soul / Something I would never lose / Something somebody stole."

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has blamed numerous people for her loss in the 2016 presidential election - James Comey, misogynistic voters, Bernie Sanders, the Russians, white working-class voters, Jill Stein, Gary Johnson . . . everyone but . . . herself.    

Okay, maybe she's not a die-hard fan of Billy Joel's music.  But I have a sneaky suspicion that these are her four favorite Billy Joel songs. 

Especially "We Didn't Start The Fire."  Because being a Baby Boomer politician means never having to say that anything is your fault.   

Music Video Of the Week - January 13, 2017

"Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" by Billy Joel (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Billy Joel - Turnstiles (1976)

Billy Joel's fourth album, Turnstiles, wasn't exactly a commercial success - its highest album chart position was in the triple digits - but it was the album on which he found his voice; his commercial breakthrough, The Stranger, couldn't exist without it.  Joel had just returned to the New York City area after having toiled in California, and on this record, he's relieved to be home.  Indeed, Turnstiles is both a love letter to New York and an ironic salutation to the LA lifestyle he left behind.  But it's more than that; it's also an album about moving on from youth, with middle age ahead over the horizon. 

From the brash Spectorian rock of the opening cut, "Say Goodbye to Hollywood," to the intense and somewhat terrifying "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)," a churning number  imagining the destruction of his beloved Big Apple, Joel offers on Turnstiles (the very title implies change) some witty and personal insights on how his life has evolved. The music is a professionally played hodgepodge of styles, from progressive rock to straight pop, with touches of jazz and even some reggae, illustrating Joel's love for all forms of music.  He doesn't always strike a solid note - as always, he's better as a pop-rock singer-songwriter than as a straight rock and roller - but when his lyrics and his music are in sync, he manages to impress.

"Summer, Highland Falls" is a beautiful piano ballad about the possibilities and fears of dealing with the times, and "James," with its understated keyboards, is a sympathetic effort to connect to an old friend.  Joel finds himself growing up in an unstable world where he appreciates the smallest pleasures in life even as he ponders the ironies of being dissatisfied with larger ones, and he takes comfort in his new life in his old locale.  He has a tendency to overdramatize things - "Prelude/Angry Young Man" goes over the top with its sarcastic put-down of youthful rebellion and its excessive piano introduction, and "I've Loved These Days" is as excessive as the drink and drug culture it seeks to satirize - but  he's finding his voice and he knows where he's going with it.

To be honest, though, Turnstiles, for all its strengths as an album of a singer-songwriter coming into his own, won't impress you unless you're a die-hard Billy Joel fan; the casual fan should instead opt for The Stranger, where Joel perfected his artistic vision.  For the die-hards, however, perhaps the best reasons to own this album are the cheeky "All You Wanna Do Is Dance," with its lighthearted steel-drum-like sound (I don't know what those instruments are) and its somewhat flippant look at mid-seventies pop-cultural values, and the decidedly gorgeous "New York State Of Mind," a stately celebration of New York City (with a saxophone performance from Phil Woods that rivals his own tour de force on Steely Dan's "Doctor Wu" of a year earlier) that makes you (and Joel himself) wonder why he ever left.   

It's either sadness or euphoria . . . 

An Innocent Old Piano Man

Singer/songwriter Billy Joel turns sixty today.