Last week, we covered the first part of William Martin "Billy" Joel's solo recording career, where he spent time out in Los Angeles before returning to New York and finding both popularity and critical acclaim, two things that rarely occur simultaneously. NOTE: With the exception of the first album featured in this post, HERC has chosen not to feature any concert albums of Billy Joel but he's gonna list every single hits compilation. We pick up our story in 1981. It was a dark and stormy night...
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Following the wildly popular tri-fecta of The Stranger, 52nd Street and Glass Houses - selling 25 million copies to date - Billy Joel took his band out on the road and recorded songs from the albums that preceded those listed above, songs his new-found fans might not have heard and songs his die-hard fans knew and loved. The resulting live album, cobbled together from various dates and cities during the tour, Songs From The Attic, was released in 1981, landed in the Top 10 on the Album charts and spawned two singles: "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" and "She's Got A Way". The latter single is one of those brilliantly recorded and edited tracks where you can't tell it is a live recording. As stated previously, HERC's favorite tracks on this one are the two singles along with "Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway)" and "Captain Jack".
Nearly a year passed before Joel released his eighth studio album, The Nylon Curtain. He has stated that he spent more time writing and recording this album, more time crafting it in the studio than any of his previous efforts. Critics likened it to a Beatles tribute. Joel indirectly acknowledged this recently on the Here's The Thing podcast hosted by Alec Baldwin:
Alec Baldwin: And you said you wanted this to be your Sgt Pepper. What was it?
Billy Joel: It’s my favorite album, really.
Alec Baldwin: Why?
Billy Joel: Because I could hear all the work that went into it, all the textures, all the layers.
Although it never attained the sales numbers of his more recent albums - going double platinum - it spawned a brief tour (following a serious motorcycle accident) and three singles, two of which ("Pressure" and "Allentown") climbed into the Top 20. HERC still finds this album hard to get into but the manic and frantic "Pressure" is a favorite.
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- 07/30/1983 "Tell Her About It" #1
- 09/24/1983 "Uptown Girl" #3
- 12/17/1983 "An Innocent Man" #10
- 03/24/1984 "The Longest Time" #14
- 07/07/1984 "Leave a Tender Moment Alone" #27
- 01/26/1985 "Keeping the Faith" #18
The videos for each song made him a star on MTV and he eventually married one of his video co-stars, supermodel Christie Brinkley. In case you were wondering, those last two singles are HERC's favorites. HERC saw Billy Joel in concert for the first and only time in April 1984 during his From A Piano Man to An Innocent Man tour.
Who was standing beside him, looking way too good in her 3/4 sleeve tour shirt (like the one above) and singing along to almost every song? The woman who would become the first and only Mrs. HERC.
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| discogs.com |
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| billyjoel.shop.livenation.com |
Billy Joel's eleventh studio (and third Number One) album was Storm Front, released in 1989. Joel co-produced the album himself with Foreigner founder/leader Mick Jones and a slightly re-vamped lineup of his longtime backing band. An incredible six singles charted in the U.S. with a seventh, "Leningrad" charting internationally. Joel's three-minute history lesson, "We Didn't Start The Fire" went on to become his third and (thus far) final Number One song. Another single, "Shameless" was covered two years later by Garth Brooks, who took it to the top of the Country charts. In the liner notes to his The Hits collection, Brooks recalls how he fell for the song:
...I was talked into becoming a member of a CD club... you know, the 40,000 CD's for a penny deal. With those clubs they write you with the selection of the month. If you don't write back and cancel, then they send it to you and charge you for it. I was on the road for six months with no one to check the mail and came home to find six compact discs in my mailbox. Storm Front by Billy Joel was one of them. I hadn't listened to Billy Joel since the late seventies, probably since Glass Houses. I fell in love with the album and fell back in love with Billy Joel's music. One of his songs really captured me, a song called "Shameless." ...
Shortly after Garth's version was released in 1991, Joel's original was released as a single and got some airplay on "soft rock" or Adult Contemporary stations. Since then, Joel and Brooks have performed the song several times together on-stage.
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Joel's contribution to the all Elvis covers soundtrack album to 1992's Honeymoon In Vegas, "All Shook Up", barely cracked the Top 100 in the U.S. but made the Top 30 in several other countries.
The year 1993 saw Joel release his last album of original pop/rock music: River Of Dreams. The album rose to the top spot - his fourth Number One album - and earned four Grammy nominations. The title track climbed up to #3 on the Singles charts. Two other singles ("All About Soul" and "Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel)" were released domestically while a fourth single ("No Man's Land") made the charts in Britain. Both HERC and Mrs. HERC are big fans of the title track.
In 1997, Joel released Greatest Hits Volume III featuring most of the singles released since his first Greatest Hits collection - which was still selling like crazy - a dozen years earlier. At the end of the album, after the first fourteen tracks, were three new studio tracks, all cover versions. Two were released as singles ("Hey Girl" and "To Make You Feel My Love") while a third had been featured on a tribute album. While Mrs. HERC prefers the former, HERC likes the latter single. Also in 1997, The Complete Hits Collection: 1973-1997, a 4 disc boxed set, was made available featuring Greatest Hits Volume I & Volume II, Greatest Hits Volume III and a fourth disc featuring interviews and a few live and unreleased songs.
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| covershut.com |
The new millennium saw the first in a seemingly never-ending stream of Billy Joel compilation albums. Released in 2000 everywhere but here in America, The Ultimate Collection is a double disc set featuring 36 songs in it's Japanese version. It was released with a slightly different tracklist for European fans.
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For American fans, The Essential Billy Joel was released in 2001. The two disc set also featured 36 tracks, including two of Joel's classical compositions. In 2008, it was re-issued with a third disc of seven tracks as The Essential Billy Joel 3.0.
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| amazon user Steve Chau |
Just a few years later in 2004, Piano Man: The Very Best Of Billy Joel was released outside of America. A single disc collection featuring 18 of his biggest hits, the album was re-released with a DVD featuring 10 videos in 2006.
My Lives, the Billy Joel box set featuring hits and rarities from throughout his career, was released in time for the gift-giving season in 2005. It featured four CDs and a DVD featuring live performances from his River Of Dreams tour a decade earlier.
Billy Joel's last charting single was "All My Life" which he wrote for his third wife in honor of their second anniversary in 2007. It only charted in Japan.
The Hits is a 19 track single disc career-spanning collection released domestically in 2010. HERC recommends it as an introduction as well as an overview of Joel's career as it is the first compilation of his to feature the songs in chronological order so you can hear his sound evolve with each song.
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Later in 2010 saw the international release of She's Always A Woman: Love Songs, another single disc compilation featuring tracks personally chosen by Joel himself.
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For the cash-grabbing gift-giving season of 2011, Joel and Columbia Records issued The Complete Albums Collection featuring Joel's 12 studio albums plus the live Songs In The Attic and 2001's classical Fantasies and Delusions. Priced out of HERC's range at $200, this limited-edition deluxe box set featured all-new remasters of each album in miniature cardboard sleeves as well as a bonus disc of rare recordings.
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Finally, in Spring 2012, Joel teamed up with Starbucks to release The Opus Collection, another single disc collection featuring 16 tracks including a few lesser known cuts among the hits.
As he's stated before and will undoubtedly state again, HERC is the fan who buys almost every release by his favorite artists - he's not a completist by definition but comes damn close. He has purchased, at least once, most of the albums listed, both here and on the previous Billy Joel post, and in more than a few cases owns both the vinyl and CD versions of those albums.
Thanks for reading - here's your playlist!
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