I was thinking about how I think about Billy Joel (very meta-), and this album helped consolidate that. He’s a little like a cross between Paul Simon and Elton John – he's got that neurotic New York Jew feel like Simon, and the varied piano-based tunes of Elton, plus the observational lyrics of both (well, of Bernie Taupin really for Elton John). The fact that this album is produced by Phil Ramone who also worked with both Paul Simon and Elton John perhaps goes some way to explaining the similarities. The songs are polished, but there’s something a little naff about him; possibly it’s the soft-rock lounge music feel to a lot of his tunes, possibly it’s just that for his early work I was too young to appreciate it, for his later work I was too cynically teenage to appreciate it.
The big track on this album is arguably Scenes From An Italian Restaurant which is really the story of Brenda and Eddie and their doomed marriage that swings from early optimism to ennui under financial pressure. From the title it feels like it ought to be a collection of vignettes of people in the restaurant, but this works. It was stitched together by Joel from song fragments that he had, doing the same thing as Freddie Mercury with Bohemian Rhapsody; this is less of a Frankenstein’s Monster of a track though, flowing much more smoothly between the slow and fast movements. I’ve always felt a little sad for Brenda and Eddie; would have been nice if they’d found rapprochement at the end.
This is balanced out by a couple of Joel’s more famous love songs - Just The Way You Are, a bit of lounge-soul, and She's Always A Woman. Both were inspired by Joel’s then-wife, who he later left for model Christine Brinkley. Ah well.
The varied style is more evident towards the end, with the Latin beat of Get It Right The First Time reminding me of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana (and is that cowbell I hear?) while Everybody Has A Dream goes quite gospel, but is also a bit like Eagles’ Take It To The Limit. And note that all of the artists that I compare Joel to have the same adult-oriented rock flavour to them. And like most of those artists, I appreciated this album, I liked it, but I didn’t love it.
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