eMusic Review
Billy Joel presents a conundrum for serious pop lovers. On the one hand, how can anyone deny the man's gifts? He writes melodies that stay in your head for-freakin'-ever, the kind you need hear only twice to memorize — and make no mistake, chances are that you've heard most of the selections on Greatest Hits Vol. I & II many more times than twice. Or, as he puts it himself on the compilation's first selection, "Son, can you play me a memory?/I'm not really sure how it goes/But its sad and its sweet and I knew it complete/When I wore a younger man's clothes.'"
Dig into those memories, though, and you discover something else about Joel that is equally difficult to get around: as golden as his ear is for tunes, it's pretty tin when it comes to words. Lots of lyricists write duff lines — just ask Bob "Can you cook or sew, make flowers grow?" Dylan. But few big-time songwriters' major works have gone clunk the way Joel's could. "Piano Man" itself moves from the felt grace of the above-quoted verse to the awkward would-be poeticism of "Paul is a real-estate novelist" (is he a dual careerist or… read more »
