3 Minutes, 49 Seconds

Billy Joel's third album was created in a rush after the success of Piano Man , and it shows. Not that it's a bad album, it just suffers in comparison to its predecessor and its immediate successors. Two of its ten songs are instrumentals. A few of them feel, well, not so much half-baked as undercooked. And it's weird becuase Billy had three songs he'd already been playing live - "Rosalinda," "Long Long Time," and "Josephine" - that didn't make the album (you can listen to live versions on the Piano Man  Deluxe Edition). Anyway, let's look at what is there. One of the reasons Streetlife Serenade underwhelms is the dearth of hits, which is just not something you expect from Billy Joel. The album only had one single, "The Entertainer," which peaked at a respectable #34. It appears on most of his hits packages (though it wasn't on the vinyl version of Greatest Hits Vol I & II ). A lack of hits isn't a problem i...

Turnstiles is, along with An Innocent Man and The Stranger , in my top three Billy Joel albums. It has pretty much everything you might want from the Piano Man. It has two beloved classics: "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" and "New York State of Mind." And while I like that they respectively open and close side one, I think these two are the key moments to the album's story, and thus wish they'd been sequenced a bit differently (more on that in a bit). It has virtuosity. The opening to "Angry Young Man," called "Prelude," with its lightning fast hammered piano, is the most obvious display of Billy's growing talents. But it wasn't just him. Turnstiles is the first recorded appearance of the Billy Joel band - Richie Cannata, Liberty DeVitto, Russell Javors, Howie Emerson, and Doug Stegmeyer - and their performances show they were able to handle pretty much anything with aplomb. It has introspection and wisdom. Billy was only 27 years old ...