Billy Joel - The Bridge

My last shortform review wasn’t actually that short, so I’m going to keep it light on this one. Such is the blessing and the curse of having no editor and no social life.

There’s just something about rock & roll piano that attracts bitter men. The kind who write melodies that would have been perfect for a girl group in 1962, but instead serve as a vehicle for the cries of this modernity-wounded animal. Elvis Costello. Joe Jackson. And their Long Island refraction, Billy Joel.

The Bridge came out a year after Joel’s first Greatest Hits album. Greatest Hits – Volume I & Volume II presumably loomed large in Joel’s psyche as he wrote the tracks for this disc. So many of the songs here deal with the pressures of eighties living and the expectations of being a superstar. Nothing groundbreaking, but Joel’s pen is as sharp as ever. The worst lyrics are only okay, and the best are incredible.

My big complaint with this record is with Joel’s keyboard. He’s working with something that was probably top of the line in 1986, but all of the organ and electric piano sounds feel so stiff and lifeless in comparison to Joel’s wailing and Liberty DeVitto’s drumming. I particularly hate the bright, plucky Yamaha DX7 electric piano patch, which feels like nails on a chalkboard to me. There’s a lot of layering of real piano with organ and synth tones on here, and I almost always wish they’d just use the straight up piano.

There are two numbers where DeVitto pulls some reggae out of a hat which I quite like, “Running on Ice” and “Big Man on Mulberry Street”. The latter is probably my favorite on the record, and an exception to the above complaint about the keyboard tones. “Big Man on Mulberry Street” is a swingin’ jazz song with a horn section, and they got the real deal session cats for it (Dave Bargeron! Alan Rubin! Ron motherfucking Carter on the bass!), so when they go for the hammy sax synth, they only do so to play into the themes of the song of faking a larger than life persona. I just wish they had asked the jazz cats to play the rest of the record.

The Bridge by Billy Joel is a bad album, but I like it.