Tag: Billy Joel

audio review : Turn The Lights Back On ( song ) … Billy Joel

“Did I wait too long to Turn The Lights Back On,” Billy Joel ponders. Considering he hasn’t made an album since 1993, I’d say yes. He’s released just one song since; All My Life in 2007; but this one is better. It also makes more sense conceptually as the long-awaited follow-up to Famous Last Words; the final song on his final album.

From the first second, this sounds like a lost gem from the past. It’s not just Billy Joel’s singing voice, which still sounds like Billy Joel after all these years, but his comfy melodies that take you back in time. It’s not till the bombastic drums come into play that you realize he’s “here right now”. Better thirty-something years late than never.

my rating : 4 of 5

2024

audio review : River Of Dreams ( album ) … Billy Joel

audio review : River Of Dreams ( album ) ... Billy Joel

The first three songs are adequate enough. If nothing else, they show that Billy Joel still has a knack for songcraft after all these years. The River starts to go downhill from there. He’s swimming hard; All About Soul is backed by what sounds like a full gospel choir; but about half of this album will drift you off to sleep.

my rating : 3 of 5

1993

audio review : The Stranger ( album ) … Billy Joel

audio review : The Stranger ( album ) ... Billy Joel

The way this album ends would match the way it begins if Anthony’s Song were moved (Out) from the first slot. It’s a good song, most here are, but it should go after the title theme. It’s also a story not just about a grocer named Anthony but a sergeant who moonlights as a bartender; two characters who have no business at the start of a Billy Joel album. Perhaps that’s the point. “We all have a face that we hide away… and show ourselves when everyone has gone,” the singer insists, “They’re the faces of a stranger, but we love to try them on.”

With that, the set can be taken as nothing more than imaginative fiction. Whether Billy Joel is serenading his beloved wife (Just The Way You Are) or trying to seduce a Catholic virgin (Only The Good Die Young), he’s merely playing the role of someone else. It’s a former schoolmate of Brenda and Eddie for Scenes From An Italian Restaurant. “Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies and the King and the Queen of the prom,” he explains on the rhapsodic epic before going on to flashily outline their marriage and sequential divorce.

my rating : 4 of 5

1977