I loved Billy Joel. I wrote him letters. I got stamped photos in return, which I put up on my wall. I had all of his albums on vinyl and listened to them over and over. I can't really pin a favorite and they all were good until he met Christie Brinkley. Then shit went south.
His first album, "Cold Spring Harbor" I could not find for a long time, then got a copy on cassette and it was okayyy, but it has one of my favorite songs, which appeared on a later album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMSo9ig_Mg8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0nCtlgaffY&list=PLb7YSwrGOyBQgrLCwNLXcNAEO3Pk5IOZV
Most people love the song Piano Man and without a doubt it is a great song. I love it, and loved to sing it at the karaoke bar in the nineties when I still went out drinking. The best song on the album though is this one:
The Ballad Of Billy The Kid always got me fantasizing about my wishful life of crime and escape from my boring life at home.
The Stranger is his most popular album, other than "greatest hits" type albums and is a performance piece best heard from beginning to end. The current culture of songs being single entities is a loss in some ways, the loss of the "album experience" of an entire piece fitting together, moving the listener through an entire emotional experience or story. The Stranger is that kind of album. All the songs are great, but I'll just post this one, which as a an amateur philosophy and psychology student, struck home:
52nd Street is another amazing album. Stiletto is one of my all time favorite songs, it is just outstanding and very sexy to me. Rosalinda's Eyes is exceptionally sweet, I find myself singing it still sometimes, and it is never played on the radio. He wrote it for his mother.
I listened to Glass Houses over and over and over. The song that most resonates with me is You May Be Right.
I'm sure this was a phase of his life when he was doing lots and lots of cocaine. I don't know why I think that, it just seems to fit.
The last album I want to share is The Nylon Curtain. I saw this album as Billy growing up, really becoming more of an adult.
The song that really hits me on this album is Pressure.
I was very disappointed with An Innocent Man and felt he was going backwards rather than forwards in his creativity. Also, I don't like Christie Brinkley for some reason. He got stupid, it seemed to me. Although I never really got invested in his music again, there is one song that captured me in subsequent albums. I learned his lullabye and used to sing it to my kids when they were little.
BEST SONG EVER:
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