3 Minutes, 49 Seconds

Turnstiles is, along with An Innocent Man and The Stranger , in my top three Billy Joel albums. It has pretty much everything you might want from the Piano Man. It has two beloved classics: "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" and "New York State of Mind." And while I like that they respectively open and close side one, I think these two are the key moments to the album's story, and thus wish they'd been sequenced a bit differently (more on that in a bit). It has virtuosity. The opening to "Angry Young Man," called "Prelude," with its lightning fast hammered piano, is the most obvious display of Billy's growing talents. But it wasn't just him. Turnstiles is the first recorded appearance of the Billy Joel band - Richie Cannata, Liberty DeVitto, Russell Javors, Howie Emerson, and Doug Stegmeyer - and their performances show they were able to handle pretty much anything with aplomb. It has introspection and wisdom. Billy was only 27 years old ...

Here's the tracklist and cover for my annual compilation. I certainly didn't anticipate a year-end mix that had Tears For Fears, Crowded House, Billy Joel, Pet Shop Boys, and the Cure on it, but that's part of the fun of being a music aficionado.  If you have Amazon Music Unlimited, you can listen here  (though I did have to subsitute "Landlocked" for "Emily Said," becuase the former is a Target-only bonus track). 1… Billy Joel... Turn the Lights Back On  2… Crowded House… Teenage Summer 3… Green Day… Suzie Chapstick 4… ISLA… Photograph 5… Taylor Swift… I Look in People’s Windows 6… Tears For Fears… Landlocked 7… The Lemon Twigs… A Dream Is All We Know 8… Old 97s… By the End of the Night 9… Nada Surf… The One You Want 10… Pet Shop Boys… Feel 11… Snow Patrol… All 12… Collective Soul… Words Away 13… Motion City Soundtrack… Stop Talking 14… Max Weinman… In Our Silence 15… Tophouse… I Don’t Wanna Move On 16… The Cure… A Fragile Thing

When I decided to write about every single Billy Joel studio album I knew had a bit of a leg up in that I'd written reviews of a handful of his records already. What I didn't realize until just now was that those reviews were of albums that had been released consecutively between 1977 and 1980. As I reread those reviews - the most recent of which is 14 years old! - I found that I still stand by them. My writing style has mellowed a bit, and I no longer give grades to albums, but otherwise my opinions then are my opinions now. So here you go... Billy Joel: Glass Houses (1980) Billy Joel: 52nd Street (1978) Billy Joel: The Stranger   (1977)

I devoted the summer of 2019 to listening to and writing about Champaign, Illinois' own REO Speedwagon. It was an eye-opening journey through a complex and inspiring history, and one that ended with me seeing them in concert for the first time. They've played nearby a couple of times since then, but I haven't ventured out for various reasons. Then I saw that they were playing right here in my hometown in early November. I looked into tickets right away, but I didn't end up buying one, partly because they were quite expensive, but mostly because Ticketmaster wouldn't let me buy a ticket for just one seat! I figured I'd wait until the day of and see what offers were out there. Then, in mid-September, came the news. The band released a statement revealing that they would cease touring - and though it wasn't stated, cease to be a band - effective January 1, 2025. In digging further into this announcement, I learned that founding member Neal Doughty retired in Ja...

The Nylon Curtain is Billy Joel's eighth album and a fascinating artistic statement from a performer who had delivered three massive hit albums in the previous five years ( The Stranger , 52nd Street , and Glass Houses ). If you want to be pithy about it, The Nylon Curtain is Billy Joel Does Lennon and McCartney. It was Billy's first set of songs to be released following John Lennon's murder in late 1980, and the spirit of the former Beatle and his band can be felt throughout the record. Billy also had the time and the budget to labor over the recording of the songs, effectively using the studio as an instrument the way the Beatles and George Martin did, especially on their later albums. Impressively, Billy manages to make his musical inspiration very clear without directly ripping off any specific Lennon-McCartney songs. It's more like he did a deep study of the Beatles' various tricks - the use of harmony, the plaintive and nasally vocals, the ambitious song str...

In his book 60 Songs that Explain the '90s, Rob Harvilla wrote the following: "I may never put on the 1994 Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral ever again, because this is music I no longer need to play out loud to hear. I can recite this record for you the same way I can recite my Social Security number." Now I realize there's not a lot of common ground between the music of Nine Inch Nails and that of Billy Joel, but the way Harvilla describes his relationship with The Downward Spiral is an exact match for my own relationship with An Innocent Man . My mom bought the cassette when it came out, and that thing lived in the tape deck of her Chevy Cavalier for at least two years, covering my sixth and seventh years. Every musical moment of this record, from the opening drum roll of "Easy Money" to the adlibbed outro of "Keeping the Faith," is imprinted in my brain. I can sing along from beginning to end for all 40 minutes, likely to the chagrin...