3 Minutes, 49 Seconds

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...