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Every Billy Joel Song, Ranked
He’s a better pop songwriter than you remember.
And though it’s been three decades since Joel released a new pop album, he has sold out Madison Square Garden a dozen or so times a year (give or take, with a pandemic interruption) since 2014, with a final show there, his 150th altogether, scheduled for July 25, 2024. Billy Joel was was never a Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa, out to subvert the conventions of pop music; his strengths are plainspoken language, melody, and (of course) piano, and the songs that depend most on those qualities tend to be better than the ones where he gets artier. Yeah, it maybe sounded cool when your friend was banging it out on the music-room piano in the eighth grade, but put it next to the gnarly chords of some actual ragtime, and you quickly realize that a rag built mostly on a C-major triad is pretty weak sauce.
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