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"I'm a big 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 up.
Joel enjoys the malleability of his music, just as he revels in the seemingly contradictory influences that molded him since he began improvising piano exercises to relieve the boredom of daily lessons when he was a kid. He counts for major inspiration the metric acrobatics of Dave Brubeck's Take Five and the seamless jazz fantasies of Oscar Peterson. He dreams of the day Ray Charles will pull one of the best songs out of the Joel portfolio, "and I'll hear New York State of Mind at the World Series." He prides himself on being a rocker, but wears a tie and jacket onstage and during performances does cocky, funny monologues about the sartorial and pharmacological indulgences of his peers.
All these divergent strains and spiky attitudes have assigned Joel uncertain territory between rock and pop and have tended to keep most big-league rock critics at a distance from his work. "I don't need that." he comments, street kid's swagger still intact. "Long, learned reviews are just hard to read."
If The Stranger does not fully reconcile all his dreams and influences, it at least contrives to let them all exist well together. Under the direction of gifted Producer Phil Ramone, the new record has a harder, more astringent sound. Joel's lyrics can be lilting, wistful or full of bite.
He is at his 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":
Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the
Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more
than that out of life.
There is great sympathy in these songs, observations that can be caustic and still stay fond. Work like this makes it quite plain that for all the contradictions, Billy Joel is writing and singing some of the best pop music in the neighborhood. It might even make Virginia Callahan think twice.