billy_joel raze tell me he hasn't done anything worth hearing in almost thirty years. tell me he's become a bad joke without a punchline. someone who sleepwalks through songs he hasn't cared about in decades for money he won't live long enough to spend. but don't tell me billy joel hasn't written some great songs, or you'll have a fight on your hands. forget "piano man". forget "she's always a woman", "you may be right", "river of dreams", and all the other stuff that's been played to death on the radio. "summer, highland falls" is a song jackson browne would kill to have written. "the ballad of billy the kid" might play fast and loose with the facts, but it's sweeping and cinematic and so much better than the unimaginative meme seth macfarlane turned it into. "scandinavian skies" is billy's "i am the walrus" — a psychedelic nightmare that documents a harrowing experiment with the hardest drug there is. "where's the orchestra?" is a gorgeous harry nilsson tribute. "sometimes a fantasy" is a sleazy, breathless celebration of phone sex. "all for leyna" and "sleeping with the television on" are about as good as new wave pop ever got. "root beer rag" will break the brain of any pianist who tries to play it. "everybody loves you now" makes spite sound like a celebration. and on "say goodbye to hollywood", for four and a half minutes a young man from long island becomes ronnie spector and sings: "so many faces in and out of my life some will last some will just be now and then life is a series of hellos and goodbyes i'm afraid it's time for goodbye again" that hits in a whole different way when you're on the other side of thirty. when i was a baby, my dad would put on his billy joel records and dance with me when i couldn't fall sleep. some nights when i have a hard time drifting off, i can still feel him rocking me back and forth. this music is set so deep in my bones, if you cut me open right now, the first song on the second side of "the nylon curtain" would start to play. when i was nine or ten, i decided "you're only human (second wind)" and "the night is still young" were the best billy joel songs ever recorded. they were the two "previously unreleased" tracks tacked onto the end of his two-volume greatest hits album. i figured he must have recorded a secret studio album off the books sometime between "an innocent man" and "the bridge". i couldn't find it listed in any official discography, but it had to be real. those songs had to come from somewhere. i didn't understand the concept of including a few non-album tracks on a compilation to sweeten the deal. i had no idea that was something people did. so the one thing i asked santa claus for that year was the mysterious full-length billy joel album that had those two songs on it. i knew santa would come through for me. he'd never let me down before. when christmas morning came, there was no billy joel album in my stocking. the album i wanted to hear didn't exist. no one could have dug it up for me. not even billy himself could have delivered it to my door. but i didn't know that, and it wasn't what i took away from the experience. the only thing i learned that day was that there was no such thing as santa claus. 211226 ... nr my sister just told me today that she has trouble listening to some of his songs because of how much they remind her of our mom. when mom could no longer speak, my sister would be cooking at my parents' place and they'd put on a song by him (the one with her name in it), and bop and sway along to it, and mom wouldn't feel as bad that she couldn't converse. 211226 ... nr i always liked "vienna." 211226 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Yesterday was the first time I heard of the Fall Out Boy cover of "We Didn't Start the Fire" and it seems to be missing the point - just throwing Stuff That Happened together without rhyme or reason (maybe a little rhyme, I dunno). The original had more order and, moreover, momentum. 231229 what's it to you? who go blather from