What’s The Topic? One of the most successful musical artists of the 20th century, the singer/songwriter Billy Joel.
Billy Joel is one of the few artists who genuinely needs no introduction. A giant of the music industry from the early 70’s until his final album in 1993, Joel has enjoyed commercial success like virtually no-one else. Currently ranked as the third highest selling solo artist in American music history, his commercial success has been vast and, though well-appreciated as both a musician and songwriter, credibility has rarely been one of Joel’s hallmarks. Well loved but, you know, never cool.
Since officially ending his recording career in 1993 after a run of twelve studio albums, Joel has continued to tour to record-breaking success. He is now so popular that he became a resident and franchise of Madison Square Gardens in New York City, performing one concert per month, and was awarded the Kennedy Centre Honours in 2013 for his lifetime contribution to American culture. That’s quite the achievement, that is.
Despite a troubled personal life that’s taken in three marriages, depression, a suicide attempt and alcohol dependency issues, Joel managed to produce record-breaking music successfully for three decades and remains an inescapable part of any story of music in the 20th century. And with a surprising new single released in 2025 as well as a brand new retrospective, And So It Goes, released the same year and providing a remarkably unflinching look at his career and personal life, it’s a perfect time to rediscover an artist whose back catalogue remains an indelible part of American music.
Stylistically:
In some ways, Billy Joel’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness – just how well known he is. That leads to what might politely be referred to as The Credibility Deficit. Joel’s a well-loved, popular and vastly successful artist in his own right but announcing yourself as a Billy Joel fan is as likely to be met with eye-rolls or “the piano guy? Really?”-type comments as it is with “oh yeah, I love him too!” Indeed, despite his huge popularity, it’s not that common to come across a Billy Joel fan in the wild, in the same way that you might with, say, Elton John or Bruce Springsteen. Despite his huge success, he’s just not that visible.
For an artist of such wide appeal, that’s surprising. Despite being a gifted, talented musician, the gap between success and respect remains a yawning chasm to cross. Equally, some of his material is so well known it’s near-impossible to come to it with fresh ears, as is not uncommon with certain hugely successful commercial acts. And their best known material often just isn’t their strongest. “Just The Way You Are” probably symbolises that as much as any other song in his back catalogue – it was a massive hit in its own right, has been covered by everyone from Barry White to Frank Sinatra (with varying degrees of success), and is probably as well-known as any other Joel song, with the possible exception of “Uptown Girl”. But like “Uptown Girl”, and despite its popularity, it’s hardly Joel’s finest work. The production, on the otherwise excellently-produced The Stranger, is somewhat insipid and light. The lyrics come across as rather clichéd and the vocal performance a little under-heated yet over-sincere. It’s easy to see why it would be as much as a barrier as it would a gateway.
Yet that shouldn’t stand in the way of enjoying the rest of his catalogue. Sure, both “Just The Way You Are” and “Uptown Girl” – the latter remaining in the public consciousness helped, if that’s the word, by a pointless note-by-note cover by Westlife – and corny, overplayed, and tedious staples of FM radio. So what? The rest of his back catalogue has some genuinely incredible music that’s well worth taking the time to explore. So put the lazy expectations to one side and embrace an artist who is so much more than a couple of hoary old top-ten hits.
Entry Point: Glass Houses
There are quite a few Billy Joel albums that could act as a potential gateway and choosing just one is no easy task. 1977’s The Stranger was Joel’s breakthrough album, catapulting him from a pretty successful musician to one of the year’s most triumphant artists. And of course it spawned, in “Just The Way You Are”, one of his signature songs. The follow-up, 52nd Street, shifted over seven million units off the back of the success of The Stranger and produced a string of successful singles in its own right. It’s kind of a fascinating album actually, full of jazz influences, smoky ballads, and interesting little vignettes. Yet Glasses Houses is arguably one of the most Billy Joel-y albums in his back catalogue. While both The Stranger and 52nd Street focus on predominantly piano-driven songs, Glass Houses has a wider range to it and is more guitar-oriented, while at the same time allowing all the familiar Joel-isms to shine through.
Glass Houses saw Joel stretching his songwriting skills just a bit further than had been the case on the previous few albums. And, with the release of “It’s Still Rock’n’Roll To Me”, it also provided another one of his signature songs. It also somehow became his first Billboard 100 Number One – you’d assume he’d have had one by this point but nope. It’s a deceptively simple song, built around a pulsing bass-line and featuring a call-and-response lyric, both sides of which are delivered by Joel in fine voice. One side of the call-and-response is delivered innocently, the other snidely decrying the importance given to image in music at the expense of the actual music. It does this by drawing on simple but effective analogies with other walks of life – “what’s the matter with the car I’m driving / can’t you tell that it’s out of style?” and “what’s the matter with the clothes I’m wearing / can’t you tell that your tie’s too wide?”, amongst others. It’s also got a blistering sax solo in the middle just to keep things moving along.
In fact, the album is lyrically stronger than anything in his back catalogue up to this point, whether it’s an unlikely ode to phone sex (“Sometimes A Fantasy”), the relaxed, gentle self-mockery of “I Don’t Want To Be Alone” or the pointed, bitter cynicism of “Close To The Borderline”. The latter, especially, feels like a refreshing step away from Joel’s more traditional material and showcases his emerging socio-political interests which would gain much more traction on the follow-up and career-best album The Nylon Curtain. The lyric is concerned with modern life in all its most miserable facets (“young girl standing on the ledge looks like another suicide / She’s gotta hit those bricks coz the news at six / gotta stick to a deadline”) and futile ironies (“I need a doctor for my pressure pills / I need a lawyer for my medical bills”). It’s a blunt, direct song that wastes no time with subtleties or shades of grey and shows him at his angriest, the song being driven by angular guitars and a furious vocal.
But one of the pleasures of Glass Houses is its range of emotions. The anger can sit equally comfortably alongside a traditional Joel ballad like “Through The Long Night”, which follows “Close To The Borderline” and closes out the album, without either seeming out of place. It’s an album of broad strokes, opening with the sound of shattering glass, a payoff from the cover art which shows on the front a leather-clad Joel holding a rock in front of a glass house and on the back a picture of him wearing an “oh-well” expression in front of a broken window like a naughty schoolboy. This connection between cover and execution show more attention to detail than we’ve had in the past and it’s a welcome development in connectivity and aesthetics.
And it all ends with a calm, quiet moment of reflection. But that calmness feels genuinely cathartic rather than dissipating the emotion of the rest of the album and acts as a suitable capper to the work. At once playful, self-aware and driven, Glass Houses has matured nicely and become one of Joel’s finest works.
Onwards!
Both the aforementioned The Stranger and 52nd Street are strong albums in their own right. The former made Joel as a recording artist and began his seemingly-immovable presence in the charts until 1993’s successful but underwhelming swan-song, River Of Dreams. 52nd Street features a few of his most well-known and beloved hits, including the sneering “Big Shot” and the calm, factually-stated fuck you that is “My Life”. Both make great entries to Joel’s work in their own right. Yet 1982’s The Nylon Curtain, although noticeably less well-known, rewards further listening much more. With The Nylon Curtain, the steps into a more socially-conscious mode of writing which began on Glass Houses really take root, but the album is produced much less lushly than anything that came either before or after in Joel’s catalogue, with a harsher, brasher, and more spartan feel to it.
As with Glass Houses the album opens with a sound effect, here an end-of-shift whistle blowing, before launching into “Allentown”. This was the second single released from the album and concerns itself with the decline of the American steel industry and the failures of the American Dream during the Reagan years. In common with most of the tracks on the album, the lyrics are direct and simply stated, yet draw their power from the simplicity of the couplets. As an opening line “Well we’re living here in Allentown / And there’re closing all the factories down” doesn’t leave a lot of room for doubt as to where the song is going.
This approach reaches its height on “Goodnight Saigon”, a song Joel wrote about the Vietnam war and the many friends he had who fought in it. It’s not an anti-war song per se, or at least not in the mode of something like John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance” or Edwin Starr’s “War”. Rather, it’s about the experiences of the soldiers who fought and allows, through those experiences, listeners to draw their own conclusions without the need to make overt, trite “war is bad” statements. The simplicity of the lyric, based on stories returning vets told Joel, allows each couplet to deliver its own statement without ever becoming melodramatic or over the top. It can be brutal in its juxtaposition of the fictions and realities of war (“we came in spastic / like tameless horses / we left in plastic / as numbered corpses”) but it doesn’t preach. It’s one of Joel’s most affecting and powerful songs.
Even the traditional Billy Joel ballad (“She’s Right On Time”) feels a little harsher on The Nylon Curtain than it has done on previous albums. It’s technically a Christmas song, though you wouldn’t find it obvious from the music – no sleigh-bells or chintzy production shortcuts here. It works on its own terms but you’d never call it traditional. And the albums two most vicious songs, the story-of-a-stalker “Laura” and the “I Am The Walrus”-meets-a-nervous-breakdown of the peerless “Scandinavian Skies” show Joel’s darker, more confrontational side. The album ends with “Where’s The Orchestra?” leading into a gentle, string arrangement that calls back to “Allentown”s melody, ending the album on a wistful note after the anger and misery of what came before it. It’s a fantastic ending to the best album in Joel has recorded.
The elephant in the room of Billy Joel albums is An Innocent Man, released in 1983. Another huge success for Joel, it’s the only album in his back catalogue which was self-consciously designed for a purpose, in this case recapturing the feel of the music Joel grew up with in the 50’s and early 60’s, specifically doo-wop and soul. The best known song from the album is, of course, “Uptown Girl” (though it only charted at number three, compared with “Tell Her About It”, which was a Number One), and as a whole it’s a relaxed, breezy album with no goal other than to entertain. It’s a marked, direct contrast to The Nylon Curtain released just one year previously, and indeed to the blues-inflected The Bridge that follows it. Joel’s voice has rarely sounded better, and a succession of hits followed, but appreciation of what has become a sharply divisive album is likely to be dependent on how you feel about a white, middle-aged man singing 80’s pastiches of 50s doo-wop and soul. Some love it, some don’t.
Notes:
The first album Billy Joel released under his own name after a few years of knocking around in other bands (hello, Attila!) was Cold Spring Harbour, released in 1971. It’s almost entirely unremarkable, despite a couple of the songs becoming concert favourites, though mostly off the back of the live recordings on Songs In The Attic rather than from the album itself. An initial mastering error resulted in the released album being a bit too fast, rather buggering up Joel’s vocals, but a mastering error can’t really cover for the fact that the material here just isn’t up to all that much. You can see the slightly corny charm of “She’s Got A Way” poking through but there’s little else to hold interest here.
The two albums that follow, Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade, are both interesting in their own way, but don’t make for the best entry and musically feel very unrepresentative of what Joel became. Both were recorded in Los Angeles rather than Joel’s native New York and have an entirely different dimension to his more familiar material and sound. Piano Man, of course, contains the most archetypal of all Billy Joel songs in its title track, though it was only a modest success at the time of its release. And “Captain Jack”, the rather epic album closer, is an excellently written slice of dead-end, go-nowhere life, captured in all its painful, blunt minutiae. It’s not the easiest of listening but it’s a crucial early song for Joel, in some ways every bit as important as “Piano Man”, the other totemic cut from that album. The rest of the album is a bit directionless though, wandering through a variety of styles without really settling on anything and as a result feels somewhat fractured.
Streetlife Serenade does settle on a style, full of twangy guitars, desert stylings and lack of focus and it’s not an especially fruitful one. The album itself is a clear step up from Piano Man, with sharper lyrics, better vignettes and, crucially, an actual sense of humour. “The Entertainer” is a terrific, self-aware song that allows Joel to vent at the music industry he was still making a name for himself in but it’s genuinely funny rather than bitter and, perhaps most importantly, he’s right. “Last Of The Big Time Spenders” is a big Billy Joel ballad in a style he would go on to make his own, and “Root Beer Rag” is a fabulously energetic piano instrumental. But there’s a directionless feel to the album that, despite some stand-out moments, never really suggests a way forward. Joel was short of material when the album needed to be released and it shows. Whereas “Captain Jack” really concluded Piano Man (for all that album’s flaws), the instrumental closer here, “The Mexican Connection”, just wanders off into irrelevancy.
At the other end of his career, Storm Front launched the inescapable single “We Didn’t Start The Fire”, a massive worldwide success for Joel with a scattershot lyric in the vein of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or “It’s The End Of The World As We Known it (And I Feel Fine)”. It put Joel back on the map after the disappointments of the largely forgettable 1986 effort The Bridge. The album shows Joel trying to reinvent himself, getting rid of most of his backing band to shake up the sound and going for a cleaner production, parting ways with long-term producer Phil Ramone and replacing him with Mick Jones (yes, the one from Foreigner). It’s a very 80’s album, slick and well put together but largely unaffecting, and displays little of the charm that makes Joel’s music such a pleasure. There’s a couple of stand-outs – the title track is good fun, “Leningrad” is poignant, and “The Downeaster Alexia” has some fire to it. But much of the album is lost in rather charmless synths and digital production and it hampers the potential of a lot of the material. Not that it stopped “We Didn’t Start The Fire”‘s ubiquity or anything (for what it’s worth, and despite the attacks the song frequently comes under, it’s a smart, clever lyric that’s utterly different from anything else Joel has ever done and deserves considerable praise for him trying to push himself in new directions).
The last proper studio album, River of Dreams, is better produced but in service of inferior material – again there’s a few highlights such as the pop-soul of the title track, and “All About Soul” has some real spark to it. But elsewhere things fall flat. “No Mans Land” tries hard to recapture the more socially conscious mode of writing Joel adopted in the early 80’s to some success but it’s not quite as convincing as once it was. “The Great Wall Of China” with it’s Kinks-derived guitar riff sounds petulant rather than angry, and it all ultimately tails off with a couple of saccharine ballads that don’t feel like they’ve got any weight to them at all. It’s a disappointing end to the recording career of one of the giants of American recorded music and someone who can do so, so much better.
The Way In:
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