3 Minutes, 49 Seconds

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...