3 Minutes, 49 Seconds

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...