Word: songs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...title of the song is the real snapper, an old tough-guy cliche flipped around and twisted like a blade ?Only the Good Die Young...
...best taking unsentimental trips back to home territory, exploring the dead ends and defeats of middle-class life in a song like Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, a melancholy, hard-driving chronicle of the battered future of high school sweethearts Brenda and Eddie, "the popular steadies/ And the king and the queen/ of the prom...
...played cocktail piano for half a year in a neighborhood bar called the Executive Room that advertised BILL MARTIN AT THE KEYBOARD. Joel emerged from this honky-tonk penance with a new wife (Elizabeth), a new contract from a major company (Columbia), and a new album whose title song, Piano Man, became a hit single...
...melody freak," says Joel. Indeed, "big" neatly describes the size of the melodies as well as his enthusiasm for them. As demonstrated by his current hit single, a graceful ballad called Just the Way You Are, Joel harks back to the luxuriant strains of superb song craftsmen like Harold Arlen as much as he follows in the tradition of masters of rock-'n'-roll delirium like Phil Spector. His songs have also been covered by belters like Streisand and jazz stylists like Bobby Scott, and seem easily to snuggle into whatever groove comes...
...NOVELS and poetry start at one place, follow a consistent course to another and hopefully make a point somewhere along the way. Recorded pop music, however, has chronically suffered from a lack of thematic focus--the aural equivalent of short story collections, pop records often veer crazily from love song to drinking song to torch song to instrumental. As often as not, the only factor holding the individual works together--if, indeed, anything does at all--is stylistic, the musical presence of the performer. An overriding theme must, of necessity, go by the boards; the constraints of the medium make...