Defend its Existence

Billy Joel

by Caralyn Green

Thirty years ago Billy Joel came out with The Stranger, an album that feels most comfortable in the backseat of my family’s wood-paneled minivan, wedged between Kenny Loggins’ “Return to Pooh Corner” and the Les Mis soundtrack, on the way to Allentown to visit cousins or the shore to binge on taffy. The company and context should tell you just how edgy Billy Joel is—about on par with Angela Lansbury. Cool? Not exactly. But a classic? You betcha.

Now Joel’s come out with a 30th-anniversary edition of The Stranger. Or rather, his label’s come out with it in hopes of turning a profit on a pop artist who’s refused to create new pop music for the past 15 years or so. Instead Joel, ever the hep cat, has been focusing on classical stuff. And crashing his car into things. And rehab.

The classical piano pieces may be lovely, but I’ve never listened and I’m guessing you haven’t either, as 2001’s Fantasies & Delusions—Joel’s only original album since River of Dreams—is his sole studio release never to go multiplatinum or at least platinum.

It’s just that no one really cares about waltzes and arias and reveries. We care about the schmaltz of “Just the Way You Are,” the lusty sass of “Only the Good Die Young” and the epic and comforting loneliness of “Vienna.” We care about the piano man who’ll stop at nothing to craft a song like “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” that’s a shamelessly appealing, last-call-rousing hit.

These hits occupy The Stranger from start to finish. It was Joel’s breakthrough album, the one that overtook Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water as the best- selling Columbia Records release of its era. It was Joel’s first time, too, working with Phil Ramone, the famed producer who’s tweaked our elder generation’s beloveds: Burt Bacharach, Barry Manilow, Elton John, Paul Simon and even Billy's idol Ray Charles.

The Stranger reissue features the original album in remastered form, as well as a previously unreleased 1977 Carnegie Hall performance. It’s for diehard fans, obviously—the ones in need of a replacement after wearing down our parents’ secondhand cassettes.