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 structures - and then put them all to use himself.
Second track, "Laura," is the most blatantly Beatlesque song on the record, with its harmonies ("if I don't care, ah-ah") and the stabbing "Getting Better" type guitar riff (and the slightly off-kilter solo). A close second is "Scandinavian Skies" which uses menacing orchestration to recall the psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ("A Day in the Life") and Magical Mystery Tour ("I Am the Walrus") Meanwhile Billy's vocal sounds filtered in the same way that Lennon's was on "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite."
Not far behind those two is "Surprises," in which Billy uses his upper register and even affects a slight British accent to make a dreamy tune that sounds like Lennon's early '70s solo work. "A Room Of Our Own" is a callback to the Beatles' earliest days, sounding akin to their early approximations of 1950s Buddy Holly rave-up tunes.
Even the songs that aren't unabashedly Beatlesque have something about them that nods to the lads from Liverpool. "Pressure" has synthesizers that replicate a harpsichord the way the speeded-up piano does on "In My Life"). "Allentown" and "Goodnight Saigon" both use sound effects similar to the way the Beatles used them on "Yellow Submarine." "She's Right on Time," is arguably the most "modern" sounding song on the album, presaging some of the guitar-driven songs on The Bridge, but still features a chamber music breakdown similar to the use of strings in "Eleanor Rigby." Closer "Where's the Orchestra" is one of many tunes on the record to have a melodically distinct "middle eight" (the Beatles' idiosyncratic name for the bridge), which was also a Lennon-McCartney specialty.
Where the album is unified in its musical lineage, on first glance, the songs are all over the place thematically. There's divorce, gender politics, the futility of war, manipulation, the plight of the working class, the weight of expectations, and bad drug trips. But underneath that diversity runs a common thread, however loose it may be, of disillusionment.
"Pressure," then, serves as the unofficial theme of the album. A top ten hit, the synth-and-drum driven song is another example of Billy being able to take something very personal (the growing sense of responsibility he felt as his musical career turned into a big-money business) into something that felt relatable to anyone who has felt the walls closing in on them.
As Billy uses other songs on the record to explore those pressures, he zooms in and out from the personal to the political.
"Allentown," of course, looks unflinchingly at the impact of President Ronald Reagan's economic policies, specifically the closing of steel mills in Pennsylvania in the early 1980s. The song takes the perspective of an unemployed factory worker realizing promises of upward mobility have been rendered moot. Things get damn dark near the end with the lines "And it's hard to keep a good man down / But I won't be getting up today / And it's getting very hard to stay...". "Goodnight Saigon" takes the perspective of U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War, highlighting the mixture of confusion, boredom, terror, and brotherhood that came with fighting in a unwinnable conflict.
Much closer to home is the mini suite of "She's Right On Time" (a love song), "A Room of Our Own" (a break-up song), and "Surprises," (a relationship post-mortem which seems inspired by Billy's divorce from first wife, Elizabeth Weber Small, which was finalized just before the release of the album).
"Scandinavian Skies" is also very personal, detailing a bad experience Billy had when he tried heroin during one of the band's early European tours, though none of this is especially evident in the impressionistic lyrics.
Where "Pressure" takes something specific and makes it generally identifiable, and "Scandinavian Skies" takes something specific and lets it remain inscrutable, "Laura" and "Where's the Orchestra" are hyper-specific but still allow the listener to find ways to identify. The former is about a family member or family friend (the lyrics make cases for it being either one) whose life has been "one long disaster" but who is a master at pulling the narrator into her drama and making him feel like "a fucking fool." Anyone who has gotten caught in the web of a manipulative good-intentions-exploiter will relate.
"Where's the Orchestra," which is also the album closer, details a trip to the theater. The narrator has high expectations for his "big night on the town" but can't get over his disappointment that the show isn't a musical like he expected. While this, again, is a highly specific scenario, it manages to convey that feeling of deep emptiness that arises when the reality of something doesn't come anywhere close to meeting our expectations. At the same time, the song works as a light condemnation of the type of person who just can't get out of their own head and enjoy things for what they are.
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While The Nylon Curtain isn't an easy or fun listen, and thus is not among my most returned-to Billy Joel albums (that would be An Innocent Man, Storm Front, The Stranger, and Turnstiles), it is definitely the album of his that deepens and becomes more intriguing with each listen. Billy himself has cited it as the work he's most proud of.
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