Ryan's Reviews

1982 had seen the release of Billy Joel's "The Nylon Curtain" featuring such classics as "Allentown", "Pressure", "Goodnight Saigon" and more. It had yielded him another success with several hit singles and a Grammy Award nomination for Album of the Year. The new album was to move in a somewhat different direction. Where "The Nylon Curtain" could be seen as paying homage to Beatles albums such as "Abbey Road" in terms of its musical arrangements and production, the new album would go back to Billy's youth growing up in the late 1950s and 60s.  "An Innocent Man" Billy's ninth studio album released on 8 August 1983 would pay homage to the sounds of James Brown and Wilson Pickett, Ben E. King and the Drifters, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Supremes and the Temptation at Motown, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Sam Cooke, Little Richard/Jerry Lee Lewis, Smokey Robin...

If you look at the output from Billy Joel between the years 1971 to 1981 with the most recent release of "Songs in the Attic", things look very impressive indeed. 1971's "Cold Spring Harbor” gave us songs like "She's Got a Way" vindicated in its 1981 single release from "Songs in the Attic" and "Everybody Loves You Now". 1973's "Piano Man" not only gave us the title song but "You're My Home", "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" and "Captain Jack". With "Streetlife Serenade" it was "Los Angelenos" and "The Entertainer", and also "Root Beer Rag". Some of these songs were not singles, but we remember them almost as if they were singles. 1976's "Turnstiles" gave us the evergreen "New York State of Mind", not to mention "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" and "Miami 2017", not to mention (again) "Prelude/Angry Young Ma...