LogFAQs > #958428104

Billy Joel's The Stranger results

The participants sorted by deviation from final results (there was a tie for sixth and I treated both songs as ranked 6.5 for this calculation):
ChainLTTP (7)
neonreaper (7)
Arti (9)
ZenOfThunder (9)
Johnbobb (11)
CasanovaZelos (12)
MetalmindStats (15)
Jesse_Custer (16)
Seanchan (17)
HBJDubs (18)
SpikeSetsFire (19)
Raetsel_Lapin (22)
Snake5555555555 (27)
BlueCrystalTear (27)

General Album Comments

Snake5555555555: Simply fantastic album, front to back. I've always been a huge Billy Joel fan, and to me, and I think many others, this is his masterpiece. There's not a single dud on this thing. It's a perfect portrait of romance painted with strokes of rock and roll, soft lulling jazz, and some of the best lyrical craftsmanship this side of popular music. "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" is a 70s progressive epic rivaling the likes of Stairway to Heaven and Bohemian Rhapsody with twice the packed storytelling, with well-paced plot beats and a poignant tragedy that I'm sure more than a few young whirlwind lovers can relate to. The storytelling continues on "Movin' Out" a cute song with a fun groove that nevertheless deals with the harsh realities of societal and family pressures, to follow your own passions despite what any other people may say or belittle you for. The rest of the tracks explore love in all its different facets, like the taboo & promiscuous Catholic girl crush in "Only the Good Die Young" which is pure rock and roll on every level, or "She's Always a Woman" in which Joel warmly sings about a woman's (it was written for his wife at the time specifically) flaws and unfeminine traits, and how, despite everything, she's still the perfect woman for him. I could play this album in full all day, it's perfect for whether you want rowdy rockers, a romantic score to set the scene, or when life gets you down and you need someone there for you who always understands.

ChainLTTP: Love me some Billy Joel even if 90% of his songs are overproduced.

Seanchan: The dirty secret is, despite this being my nomination...I've never actually heard this album before! Okay, okay, that's more like a half truth (or a 2/3rds truth to be precise).

My love of Billy Joel is almost entirely from that 2 CD Greatest Hits Volumes 1 and 2 that was put out in the mid 80s. I've heard that collection a million times (and I'm only slightly exaggerating). But we can't (or shouldn't) nominate greatest hits albums, and so I looked and quickly realized most of The Stranger (6 of the 9 songs) is on that collection. And now here we are.

I did a full listen and my brain had such a hard time processing the 3 songs I hadn't heard. The other 6 are practically ingrained in my soul at this point, and so I just wasn't sure what to think about the "other" songs. Did I think lesser of them just because they weren't on the Greatest Hits or because they are truly lesser? Going to do another listen this week to give them another chance.

MetalmindStats: The Stranger was probably the single upcoming album I was most looking forward to - I was planning to participate this week back even before I decided to try returning in full. I guess my first listen brought me face-to-face with the flipside of setting expectations rather than going in fully open-minded, though. In short, my initial impression of The Stranger was unexpectedly middling, milquetoast, and generally mediocre. Now I'm hoping familiarity will ease me into numbers 2-3 the way it usually does, rather than breeding contempt - but if not, I guess I'll always have Vienna.

Then again, I actually like We Didn't Start the Fire, so take everything I just said with a grain of salt.

BlueCrystalTear: Top to bottom, this is Billy Joel's finest work. Not a single bad song here. I can see why the rankings are all over the place.

ZenOfThunder: damn i love this album

Raetsel_Lapin: Fantastic album.

CasanovaZelos: The weird thing about this album to me is that I really do not care about any of these songs on their own, but I can enjoy them together. The Stranger is a much better album than the sum of its parts.

MetalmindStats: I kind of knew my first take was indeed wildly premature once certain songs popped into my head as I revisited this topic to compose my original thoughts. The circumstances in which I conducted my second listen leave only one explanation, which is that I, for whatever reason, decided to have a contrarian opinion and initiated this week looking to fit that narrative. Without that baggage, I found The Stranger roughly as enjoyable and to my taste as I had expected all along.

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My top 100 games (with write-ups): https://foolfantastic.com/top-100-video-games-project/
Top 250 songs: https://foolfantastic.com/3290-2/