We started at the end, and now we finish at the beginning. Billy Joel's first solo album has a reputation as a sort of curiousity in his catalog. For one, it was quite hard to find for a long while, as it was initually released on a small label called Family Productions and was very spottily distributed. Another bit of intrigue was that the album was initially mastered at the wrong speed, with the main effect being Billy's vocals - which were already much higher-pitched than what we'd become used to - being pitched up to near Alvin and the Chipmunks levels. In 1983, with Billy at the height of his commerical success, the album was remixed, and given some overdubs and edits. That stands today as the "offical" version, though neither the fans nor Billy himself are happy with it. So I suppose a caveat to this entire review is that Cold Spring Harbor is not the album it was intended to be. That said, I'm going to attempt to take it at face value, using the widel...
For the longest time, I mistook Piano Man as being Billy Joel's third album instead of his second. When compared with Streetlife Serenade , it just seems so much more realized and complete. Each song lived-in and thought-through. While not a perfect album, it seems like a logical lead-in to his run of classic records that started with Turnstiles . I don't know if my confusion speaks more to the unevenness of Streetlife Serenade or to the quality of Piano Man , but for the purposes of this review, let's say it's the latter. As a whole, Piano Man feels like a collection of lost songs from Broadway productions. I say "productions" plural becasue this is not a concept album. The songs are all over the place thematically and musically, but what they share in common is a theatricality of presentation and a focus on storytelling. To my mind the album is anchored by three epics that come at the beginning, middle, and end. First is the semiautobigraphical "Piano...