Send "Billy Joel " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Billy Joel’s songs remain inescapable, at least at the grocery store, so count your blessings. They could be a whole lot blander. The guy’s two basic modes are bathetic and jerky. He’s eager to please and ready to fight. Some songs, like “Piano Man”, mix up the bathos with the jerkiness. Some, like “Allentown”, avoid both completely. If you’re forced to choose between the two, Joel’s obnoxious songs are way more interesting than his sappy songs.So give Columbia Records credit. When forced to choose 19 songs for Joel’s first career-spanning single-CD compilation, The Hits, they went with the big shots. At nearly every opportunity, this album goes for the sarcastic jugular, neglecting the melodic salves that often charted higher. (Although, this being Billy Joel, even the sarcastic melodies are pretty great.) Joel’s 1971 debut, Cold Spring Harbor, is represented not by the ballad “She’s Got a Way”, but by the obscure Bronx cheer “Everybody Loves You Now”. (Best line: “Keep your eyes ahead and don’t look down / And lock yourself inside your sacred wall”.) Likewise, The Hits omits “She’s Always a Woman” and “Just the Way You Are” from Joel’s existential screed The Stranger, opting instead for the anti-Catholic “Only the Good Die Young” and the anti-”ack”-word “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”. (Of the hard-working Sgt. O’Leary, Anthony says, “If he can’t drive with a broken back / At least he can polish the fenders”. It’s a perfect line of spiteful illogic.) 52nd Street is here not for “Honesty”, but for “My Life” and “Big Shot”, home of the world-historic “Dom Perignon in your hand and the spoon up your nose”. According to this compilation, the Top 10 hits “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” and “An Innocent Man” don’t exist. That’s a world I wanna live in. The Hits makes a convincing case for Joel as an ace stylistic shapeshifter, even adjusting his voice as he dabbles, the old Beatles trick. The throaty emoter of “New York State of Mind” is barely present in the Joe Jackson clone that whips out “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”. True, Joel’s genre exercises sometimes miss their mark. In “A Matter of Trust”, Joel’s “hard rock” band just kind of sits there, and his sweet doo-wop entry “The Longest Time” has always seemed marred by its anachronistic “I want you so bad”. But still—how many singers would attempt both those songs, let alone write them? Try to reconcile the one-man choir of “Time” with the blowhard who bellows, “I know you’re an emotional girl!” in “A Matter of Trust”. You’ll either get really depressed about American masculinity, or you’ll admire the naked hustle of our sixth-biggest recording artist. When it comes to entertaining us, he’s shameless....full text |
| Musictap |
| With the singles output that Billy Joel enjoyed for many years, it was never surprising to me that a ‘best of’ needed to be a multi-disc affair, as his original collection is, along with a single disc add-on, Volume 3. And they did well. With a momentous 40th Anniversary coming up of his Cold Spring Harbor album, it is no surprise as well that the label would look back in celebration of one of the best-selling Pop artists of Rock and Roll. Legacy kicks off this celebration with a single-disc collection of Billy Joel tracks, a 19-track compilation that exclude a few surprising hits (“Uptown Girl”, “Just The Way You Are” (which stung me a bit), “She’s Always A Woman”, “The Stranger”, “Don’t Ask Me Why”, “An Innocent Man”, “Keeping The Faith”, and the list goes on). What this single disc does – and does very well – is remind you by exclusion just how prolific a hit-maker Billy Joel was. What sets this collection apart, in minor detail, is the songs’ remastering, and the inclusion of “Everybody Loves You Now” from Cold Spring Harbor, a tune that is usually ignored but now sets the stage for the upcoming reissue of the album. The Hits, otherwise, is merely a signpost release that leads directly to the upcoming reissue campaign of 14 Billy Joel albums (The Complete Albums Collection) that will include an anticipated bonus CD of 17 non-LP tracks like the suicide prevention song, “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”, which is found on the first Billy Joel ‘best of’, and “All My Life”, a Valentine track. The Hits loosely collects well-known Billy Joel tunes and could appeal to new fans or those who haven’t gotten any of the other ‘best of’ albums including The Essential Billy Joel. The included booklet contains a selection of photos, and is complete with lyrics of the included songs (again, I believe, with an intent to bring in a new set of fans, as all of us old-timers know the songs by heart by now). If you want a well-assembled Billy Joel ‘best of’, then seek out either the three-volume collection, The Essential Billy Joel, or the boxed The Complete Hits Collection: 1973-1997 set. But if you’re a curious outsider, or a casual Billy Joel fan, then The Hits is a good deal for you....full text |
| Blogcritics |
| It was August 2, 1994. Billy Joel and Elton John were in Pittsburgh for a concert at Three Rivers Stadium, a concert that had been sold out almost as long as tickets had been on sale. At the last minute, they opened up some seating behind the stage. We drove in early looking to scalp a couple of tickets, but when push came to shove we settled for the newly released seats; turned out to be not such a bad deal. The seats were fairly close to the stage. Joel and John, when they were seated at the piano were always in profile, and when they were up on their feet, they always made some effort to play to those of us sitting behind. It was a great concert, one of the best. Three Rivers Stadium is gone now. Elton John is touring with Leon Russell. And Billy Joel is set to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release Cold Spring Harbor, his first solo album, in 2011. In conjunction with that anniversary, Columbia/Legacy is releasing a nineteen-track collection of the Piano Man's best, The Hits. Looking back at Joel's playlist for that '94 concert, it isn't strange that almost all of the songs he played that night are featured on this new album. This was, after all, the zenith of the singer's career. Indeed, "The River of Dreams," the latest song on the album, dates from 1993. The Hits begins with "Everybody Loves You Now" from his first album. "Piano Man" and "The Entertainer" follow. The mellow "New York State of Mind," from 1976's Turnstiles, is followed by two from 1977's The Stranger, "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" and his anthem, "Only the Good Die Young." "My Life" and "Big Shot" close out the songs from the seventies....full text |
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