3 Minutes, 49 Seconds

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...

As you may know, I'm something of a connoisseur of compilations. I have three guidelines that I like my greatest hits to follow, though I am open to these rules being disregarded in certain cases. It's not an exact science. Billy Joel's 1985 Greatest Hits Volumes I and II (an odd title for a set that was never sold separately) is proof of that.  It mostly follows the rules. The songs are in chronological order. There are no remixes, just a couple of single edits; there are two live song, but those were actually were the versions that charted. And there are two new songs - we'll get to them eventually - but both ended up in the Top 40, so in retrospect that was a good decision. My mom bought the double LP when it came out and then dubbed it to a tape that lived in her car for at least three years. It and An Innocent Man were part of the soundtrack of the second half of my first decade of life. So I have a hard time criticizing something so ingrained in my consciousnes...

The Bridge is known in the Billy Joel catalog as "the one he was forced to make." Having conquered the world with 1983's An Innocent Man (featuring his second number one hit, "Tell Her About It") and his 1985 Greatest Hits album, Billy married Christie Brinkley and they promptly had a daughter, Alexa Ray. Understandably, he didn't want to leave his new wife and baby to spend time in the recording studio, especially when he barely had enough songs for an album. He was also at odds with his long-term collaborators, producer Phil Ramone and the Billy Joel Band (Doug Stegmeyer, Russell Javors, and Liberty DiVito), all of whom he'd worked with for ten years of his greatest successes. In fact, The Bridge would be the last album of their legendary run, but musically it fits much more with the two albums that succeeded it than the ones that came before. That is to say, it's the beginning of Billy's late stage shift to adult contemporary. Even so, The...

Following in the footsteps of  the Beatles and Billy Joel comes "Weird Al" Yankovic. While nothing can quite top the 30-plus year silences of the other two, consider that "Weird Al" has only given us three new songs in 10 years: 2018's "The Hamilton Polka," last year's "Now You Know" and the brand new "Polkamania." And since I've written about all of his previous music, I'm obliged to keep it going.  I don't have a lot to say about "Now You Know," except that I really enjoyed Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and the way it skewered so many conventions of rock biopics. The song - a Dire Straits soundalike that turns into a soul rave-up - plays over the credits, and while it works well there, it's not something that stands particularly well on its own. Now let's talk about polkas. Going all the way back to his second album (1984's In 3-D ), "Weird Al" has been doing polka medleys of popul...

I got Storm Front on cassette for Christmas 1989, which was odd for a couple of reasons. For one, it was exceedingly rare for me to get music as a gift. Yes, I'd been a known Billy Joel fan since 1983's An Innocent Man , but nobody bought me The Bridge  (1986) or the live Kontsert (1987)   album, so why this one? Did I ask for it? Did someone just make a wild guess? I don't remember. And what did 12-year-old me make of songs about the economic plight of fishermen ("The Downeaster 'Alexa'"), manic depression ("I Go To Extremes"), Russian clowns and the ultimate futility of the Cold War ("Leningrad") and doomed relationships ("And So It Goes")? I didn't really pay attention to the lyrics, honestly. Mostly I connected to melodies and instrumental elements that caught my ear.    As an adult I'm struck by how uniformly strong Storm Front is. It's a vital piece of work, depicting its creator's life and concerns in v...

River of Dreams  is Billy Joel's 12th and (up to now) final album. It's an album possessed of anger, cynicism, and resignation. These emotions and themes were nothing new for Joel, but not since 1982's  The Nylon Curtain  had he released such a downer collection. In fact, the three songs that got radio play (the title track,  All About Soul , and  Lullabye ) are the only fully positive songs on the record.  The album is a slow starter. Opening song  No Man's Land  is a guitar heavy condemnation of modern society. Billy had written eloquently about societal ills before (such as the plights of working men and women on  " Allentown"  and  The  Downeaster  "Alexa" ), but here ham- fistedly  takes lower-rung topics like mega-malls, tabloids, and television.  Great Wall of China  is similarly bitter, and at first blush appears to be a pretty good break-up tune. However, further analysis points to the song being ab...

"Christmas in Fallujah" (2007) Dismayed by the second Bush administration's war on Iraq, Billy wrote this protest song. He gave it to an up-and-coming singer-songwriter from Long Island, Cass Dillon, saying that it made more sense coming from someone who was around the age of the soldiers who were fighting. (A live version with Billy on vocals was released as a single in Australia).  The guitar-based, Beatles-ish tune sounds musically like it could have fit on Billy's last album, River of Dreams . Lyrics-wise, it is very much a successor to "Goodnight Saigon" from 1982's The Nylon Curtain . But whereas that song avoided passing judgment on the war itself, "Christmas in Fallujah " doesn't. Part of the song focuses on the soldiers, who feel forgotten, afraid, and alone. But the sharpest lines take aim at the profit-minded thinking that put them there in the first place: "They say Osama's in the mountains / Deep in a cave near Pakista...

We are living in the age of musical miracles. I had long ago resigned myself to the fact that we'd never again hear new music from The Beatles or Billy Joel. Then, in the space of four months both broke their silences. The Beatles, of course, gave us the gorgeous "Now and Then" in early November 2023, their first "new" music since the mid 1990s. Billy Joel, in early February 2024, released his first song since "Christmas in Fallujah" and "All My Life" In 2007. One could make a strong argument that we should really label "Turn the Lights Back On" Billy's first new song since 1993. "Christmas in Fallujah" was given to a young singer/songwriter named Cass Dillon. "All My Life" was a Rat Pack-style jazz ballad written for Billy's third wife upon their marriage. Neither was marketed as an end to Billy's retirement from recording. "Turn the Lights Back On" is very different in that regard. Its lyr...

Not long ago I sat down with a DVD compilation of Billy Joel videos and promotional films. As I watched him play an unshaven guardian angel, car mechanic, and game show contestant I was reminded again of my abiding love for his music. Granted, it doesn't take much to remind me. I've been a fan since I was six years old and my mom played tapes of An Innocent Man (1983) and Greatest Hits (1985) over and over in the car as we drove around town. In college I did a deep dive into his catalog and found that and found that Billy's music - even the songs I didn't listen to growing up - helped ground me whenever I felt lost in the process of growing up.  This deep connection has continued through adulthood, and I haven't shied away from writing about him on this blog over the years. In fact, I've written reviews about four of his 12 studio albums. So it occurrs to me that he is a prime candidate for an every-album-reviewed project. In case you're new around here, I...

Before a person is allowed to write about music, they must commit to an oath comprised of several tenets. One of the most sacred of these is that any time an artist releases a double album, your reaction must be to say that it would have been so much better as a single album .  On April 26, 2024 the biggest pop star of the last 15 years, Taylor Swift, released her eleventh album. The initial streaming, CD and vinyl versions of The Tortured Poets Department featured sixteen tracks, with four different bonus songs available CD. Then, at 2am on April 27 streaming services were hit with The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology , a 31-track behemoth featuring the original 16 songs, the 4 bonus tracks, and 11 additional songs.  Given that Swift was riding as high as any musician ever has, one might think that perhaps this album would be an exception to the critical rules. But it wasn't. After all, another of those of those very rules is that backlash is inevitable.  So eve...