I always had a complicated relationship with Billy Joel’s love songs. As worldly wise and street tough as his albums could no doubt be, in particular early on, something seemed to go wrong when he tried to talk about girls.
Now, I had no quibble with Joel’s other ballads, and I loved his saloon songs. The Stranger would be infinitely poorer, for instance, if “Vienna” didn’t arrive between “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” and “Only the Good Die Young.” There, though, Billy Joel’s observational skills were sharper, and his playing, it seemed, wittier.
Needless to say, I approached Columbia Legacy’s new 79-minute compilation of them, called She’s Got a Way: Love Songs and due January 22, 2013, with no small amount of dread.
I hadn’t been a regular consumer of the retired Joel for some time, and it had been longer still since I’d examined tracks like “Just the Way You Are” and “She’s Always a Woman.” With both, celebrated though they may have been back in 1977, it’s as if Billy Joel was a bit too cool to admit anything about love. Dig deeper, and all you find are a series of searing, backhanded compliments.
Even so, elsewhere She’s Got a Way has a way of illuminating new corners in Joel’s legacy. Listening, I guess I had painted all of his love songs with the same brush. This project, in fact, offers a smart mix of rarities and deep cuts sprinkled around expected hits like those, 1993’s “All About Soul,” 1989’s “And So It Goes,” and 1986’s “This is the Time.” And it’s in those places, rather than within more familiar moments like 1978’s “Honesty,” where this forthcoming compilation earns its keep — though I must say, “Honesty” certainly stretches the idea of a “love” song to its limit: If anything, Joel seems to have completely had it with such pursuits.
Working well away from the hits, I guess I fell in love with Billy Joel again. It had been forever — too long, I realize now — since I’d put on my vinyl copy of 1971’s Cold Spring Harbor for a spin through the shatteringly beautiful “Nocturne.” I can’t remember the last time I revisited the locomotive “Travelin’ Prayer” from 1973’s Piano Man, or the layered complexity of “She’s Right on Time” from 1982’s Nylon Curtain, either. They made the more obvious conceits here come alive, and the wrong-headed ones more palatable.
Elsewhere, I thrilled to the all-but-forgotten “You’re My Home,” a loping country-fried b-side from the “Piano Man” single in 1973, and listened with fresh attention to Billy Joel’s starkly confessional “Temptation” from The Bridge in 1986. (Time for my own confession: I skipped past “State of Grace” and the Garth Brooks vehicle “Shameless,” not wanting to break the reverie.) Within this new context, even warhorses like the title track of 1983’s An Innocent Man, and 1985’s greatest-hits add-on “The Night is Still Young” held new-found meaning, as Joel began slowly turning his knife-edged criticisms inward. Older in life, and in love, I heard new things.
Of course, She’s Got a Way: Love Songs still can’t match the clinched, visceral power of tracks like “Captain Jack,” “Big Shot” and, of course “Angry Young Man.” But as we enter another decade without new pop music from Billy Joel, this set’s small revelations, sadly, are apparently all we have left. In that way, I welcomed them.
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Billy Joel has long been one of my favorites & I’ve taken so much heat for that over the years. I still can’t figure out why so many people hate him.
My soon to be wife and I beat Cold Spring Harbor into the ground we thought the songs were so good. All the while we wondered what his “real” voice was like. “She’s Got A Way” is still one of my BJ favorites.
His best album is the live set Songs in the Attic where he does what he says are better versions of many of his tunes than the originals.
BTW, if you ever do a “Five Songs Where Billy Joel Sucked” please head the list with “You May Be Right” & “It’s Still Rock n’ Roll.”