Every Billy Joel Studio Album, Ranked From Worst to Best

I sort through the Piano Man's musical legacy.

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For someone who has sold over 160 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music acts of all time, and 85 million in the US alone, you’d be hard-pressed to find a stranger, more unexpected career arc than Billy Joel’s.

He spent the better part of a decade making records nobody bought before he ever became a household name. Between 1970 and 1976, he released four studio albums, moved to California under a management contract so punishing that it stripped him of every royalty and publishing right he owned, played piano in a bar under a fake name to pay rent, and watched each new release essentially disappear without a trace commercially.

For a while, he was genuinely invisible.

Then came The Stranger in 1977, and everything changed overnight. In the 16 years that followed, he saw four of his albums hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200, and enjoyed a run of pop-rock hits so consistent and so widely absorbed into American culture that they’ve become part of the furniture. I’d wager that many of you reading this don’t come to “Piano Man” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire” fresh, but rather with a brain that’s pre-loaded with a lifetime of associations to his music.

That dynamic is exactly why this studio album ranking exercise is worth doing. It forced me to look beyond familiarity and make decisions based on quality rather than reputation alone. While the hits are well-known, the more interesting debates lie in the less-trafficked corners of his discography, highlighting records that critics consistently dismissed, never warming to him in the first place.

Even if you think you know this oeuvre inside out, there’s likely a surprise or two in store for you.

Before we begin, the usual reminder to like, subscribe, and comment on what I missed or what changes you’d make to this list. You can also check out the other discography ranking deep dives I’ve published previously, including in-depth looks at the studio albums of the Beatles, Aretha Franklin, and many more.

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12. Streetlife Serenade (1974)

Joel has said Streetlife Serenade is his least favorite of all his albums, and the production choices do not help its case in a revisionist sense. What saves it from being a pure write-off is Joel’s charisma as a performer. The portions of this record that work best are the ones where the arrangements give him plenty of room to speak plainly, and in several cases, air his petty grievances.

The best of those moments is “The Entertainer,” and maybe it’s because it had been a while since I’d heard it, but it plays as remarkably bitter. Joel torches the singer-audience contract with a knowing smirk, skewers the suits he had been forced to glad-hand, and takes a specific pot shot at Columbia for editing “Piano Man” down to a “suitable length” for radio without his blessing. “If you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05,” he sings at one point, which is deliciously ironic, because “The Entertainer” runs exactly … you guessed it, 3:05. Disc jockeys thought he was complaining about fame, even after Joel said repeatedly that it wasn’t the intent. “It’s a put-down,” he explained at the time. “Sticking a pin in the balloon of the performer.” The song hits hard either way, and the distinction mostly got lost.

Elsewhere, “Roberta” is looser and funnier, a portrait of a sad sack pining after a woman who’s clearly out of his reach, and “Los Angelenos” is an adequate stomper with more energy than most of what surrounds it on the tracklist. Outside those highlights, though, not much gets off the ground. Joel sounds tired, and more than tired, he sounds fed up with this version of himself. The horns feel borrowed and the strings reflexive. He was in the wrong city, working with the wrong people, under the worst possible contractual circumstances, and the record sounds like all three of those things at once. To add insult to injury, the album peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard 200 and eventually went Platinum, but Ripp’s royalty arrangement meant that every sale enriched a man Joel despised.

It isn’t a shock that he shed the vestiges of that LA existence and returned to New York for a reset. The move back east, and everything it unlocked, would more than make up for it.

11. Storm Front (1989)

I have a feeling this ranking may step on a few toes, but I found very little engaging or resonant about Storm Front. Instead, song after song, I couldn’t shake this overwhelming sense that I was listening to an artist who, despite having nothing left to prove, was still sprinting full-tilt on pop music’s hedonic treadmill, chasing the next commercial milestone at the expense of the distinctive soulfulness that Joel’s hugely successful late-70s and early-80s records contained in spades.

The stench of an overcorrection wafts through every crack and crevice of this tracklist. Following the more tepid commercial response to The Bridge (more on that album in a few minutes), he fired most of his band and parted ways with long-time producer Phil Ramone, the man who had figured out how to lend warmth to Joel’s storytelling without sacrificing any of the edge he sang or played with. Instead, the singer/songwriter brought in Foreigner’s Mick Jones, supposedly by way of a recommendation from Eddie Van Halen, who brought with him a big, tinny arena sheen that, for a lot of people, works well enough on the LP’s centerpieces but fits poorly on basically everything else. There are some charismatic flashes here and there, but Storm Front was, unfortunately, just a series of strange, borderline nonsensical choices.

Take “That’s Not Her Style” as an opening track. It’s a deeply weird and uncomfortably defensive ode to his ex-wife Christie Brinkley that’s aged about as well as you’d expect. Forget the cringeworthy mansplaining tone to it all, but my goodness, some of the writing is too icky to shrug off. At one point, after he says the papers imply she’s stepping out on him with another, potentially richer guy, he says: “And then she chartered a Lear when she heard her career was in danger/And gave the pilot somethin’ extra for a perfect ride.” Tell me you’re insecure about your marriage without actually saying those words, Billy. “I Go to Extremes” and “Shameless” are two other examples of songs that are far more toothless than their titles suggest, which is a specific kind of disappointment in its own right. It should be noted that Garth Brooks covered “Shameless” two years later and took it to No. 1 on the country charts. He’s even performed it with Joel multiple times. I wonder how well that sits with the latter party.

Then there’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which, honestly, I can’t anymore with this song. I will pause for a moment and acknowledge that it hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 and, in the decades that followed, became such a cultural fixture that schools around the US have built parts of their history curricula around it, so, if hearing it means youngsters can rattle off the names of important world events a bit faster on an exam, there’s a sliver lining in there somewhere. But strip all that away, and you’re left with a gratingly mediocre song, one that Joel has since called his worst musical composition. The critique is easy enough to make: it’s repetitive and flat, and the lyrical conceit is even more annoying. Underneath the Forrest Gump-style inventorying of decades of geopolitical chaos, there’s a self-serving shoulder shrug that implicitly distances the Boomers from any accountability for any of it. Maybe they didn’t start the fire, but they certainly didn’t run in droves to get hoses and buckets to try to put it out. Forgive me, a millennial, for having exactly zero sympathy for the fallout from such inaction.

What saves the record from being a complete write-off is “Leningrad,” which at least tries to push past the corporatized sonic baseline and reach for something approximating genuine feeling. “And So It Goes” is similarly unguarded, but also so sonically spare that the piano ballad sounds like it wandered in from a different planet. Joel wrote it years before Storm Front came together, which explains the jarring stylistic shift right at the end of its runtime. I say all of this knowing I’m in the minority about this album, however. Storm Front topped the Billboard 200, went Platinum four times over, and (somehow) earned five Grammy nominations. It boosted Joel’s commercial prospects globally because it was engineered to do exactly that. Mission accomplished, I guess.

10. Cold Spring Harbor (1971)

Before Billy Joel was Mr. “Piano Man,” he was a cautionary tale about how the music industry can really screw you if you’re not careful. He recorded this debut under the thumb of Artie Ripp, owner of Family Productions, who had signed the 22-year-old Joel to a downright deplorable 10-record contract. The deal essentially stripped him of his rights to both the master tapes and the publishing on every song he’d ever write under its banner, which meant that, in the few years that followed, and as Joel’s star rose, particularly on FM radio, he didn’t see a dime of those royalties. Never forget to read the fine print, kids.

Back to the actual record. The sessions that produced this initial group of Billy Joel songs went smoothly enough, though you could safely call this a one-note soft-rock tracklist, too. Cold Spring Harbor is as much a product of the singer-songwriter boom that peaked in the early 1970s, with artists like James Taylor and Carole King finding success by stepping out from behind the beaded curtain of the for-hire lyricist and into the spotlight as performers in their own right. Joel was clearly trying his hand at crafting the kind of subdued, introspective record that was doing decent business in 1971, and there are glimmers of the talent that would later make him a global superstar.

Songs like “She’s Got a Way,” later a live show staple, and “Everybody Loves You Now” hint at the sophisticated storytelling of his upper-echelon material, particularly in the earnest, tender ballad lane. Also, I’ll say it now: Joel isn’t one to shy away from a cornball bit of songwriting if the opportunity presents itself. You have to meet the songs on that level if you hope to enjoy them to their fullest. I got some blowback in my “best of” Chicago article for putting “If You Leave Me Now” up there with the band’s best material. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but the logic that everything they did tracked went downhill when they got “soft” won’t get you very far with Joel’s discography. You’ve been warned advised.

The legacy of Cold Spring Harbor was, for the longest time, the botched mastering. The tapes were transferred to vinyl at too fast a speed, raising the pitch of everything by a half-step and giving Joel’s voice a thin, chipmunk-like quality. Joel later said that he threw the finished record across the room when he first heard it back. I would’ve done the same. But Ripp, in his infinite wisdom, didn’t bother to correct the error, and, expectedly, the album sold virtually nothing. Columbia reissued a remixed, speed-corrected version in 1983, after Joel had become famous enough that the history mattered. The mastering disaster gets the headline because it’s the more dramatic story. But even a clean pressing would have been a modest debut. Cold Spring Harbor isn’t a great album. It was a sabotaged one, though, and there’s a difference.

9. River of Dreams (1993)

River of Dreams is, as of this writing, Billy Joel’s final studio album of pop originals, and despite releasing a surprise single in 2024, it seems likely to stay that way. Based on interviews he’s given this millennium, I don’t think he planned to make this LP his swan song, but the experience sounds agonizing enough that he didn’t want to put himself through it again.

“The thing was, I put a lot of work into River of Dreams, and it was as if the business had left me behind,” he told Vulture in 2018. “So I said, ‘What’s the point of putting myself through writing and recording if it doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to mean out there in the world?’” It’s amusing to read that portion of the interview and see the interviewer push back on Joel’s notion that it underperformed. After all, it did top the Billboard 200 on its initial release and sold millions of copies. But, when pressured for more insight, Joel replied bluntly: “I just had higher expectations for it. Then the record company [Columbia] came in and said, ‘Okay, what’s your next album going to be?’ And I went, ‘No, that’s it.’”

Of all the Joel records in this ranked list, River of Dreams was the one I was least familiar with, aside from the eponymous lead single, which has a fun 1960s throwback energy, not unlike what he did so well on An Innocent Man. Maybe it’s the fact that I went into this album listen with little-to-no expectations, but I dug it more than I thought I was going to. Granted, it’s Joel in full-on adult contemporary mode, so take that for what you will, but you can also hear the pedigree in every note. Joel’s flanked by a lot of top-tier studio talent on this record, including producer Danny Kortchmar, who’d worked with King, Taylor, Don Henley, Linda Ronstadt, and dozens of others. It sounds expensive and impressive, particularly on tracks like “All About Soul,” which feature a full gospel choir.

But, underneath all the polish, is a more measured, mature strain of Joel’s signature melancholy. There’s an understanding, especially on songs like “The Great Wall of China” and “Shades of Grey,” that life’s most meaningful conflicts seldom have clean resolutions. There’s also “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel),” a song written for his daughter Alexa, framed as a parent talking to a child about mortality and the persistence of love beyond death. It’s quietly one of the most devastating compositions in his entire catalog, a piano ballad so direct and free of self-consciousness that I was low-key stunned.

River of Dreams has often been talked about as Joel ending his studio output on a less-than-stellar note, but I’m not positive that’s actually the case. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and even if it didn’t blow people away, I think we’d all be talking about his legacy as a songwriter much differently had Storm Front been his final collection of original songs. It’s not like things didn’t work out for Joel, either. He has spent the past three decades performing to sold-out arenas and generally enjoying his time as a raconteur in interviews across various media formats. Not such a bad way to extend one’s career, if you ask me.

8. The Nylon Curtain (1982)

Long touted as Joel’s “statement album,” The Nylon Curtain has ambition to spare. Much of the songwriting sounds like a Boomer spokesperson working through frustrations and anxieties in real time as the US grappled with the early stages of the Reagan-era decline. On that level, it’s decently compelling, especially throughout its first side.

Opener “Allentown” sees Joel crafting a cutting portrait of post-industrial Pennsylvania (one that apparently served as a proxy for Bethlehem, where real-life mills and factories were shutting down weekly at the time). The found-footage nature of the song is well done, incorporating clangs and steam-whistle sound effects into the arrangement so seamlessly that you forget they’re there. There’s a nod to Bruce Springsteen and Don McLean in there, but it’s an arresting way to kickstart the LP. Elsewhere, “Pressure” is full of fire, featuring eight overdubbed synthesizers that push the sense of dread into the red. “Goodnight Saigon” runs seven minutes, opens and closes with the emulated sound of Bell UH-1 Huey rotor blades, built from a Roland synth and processed tom-toms, and was built from first-hand accounts about what Vietnam felt like from inside. It probably should have closed the album.

Instead, it lands mid-sequence, and the second side struggles under the weight of the concept it’s trying to carry. The tracklist post-"Saigon” isn’t awful, but the momentum and focused energy definitely take a hit. “Surprises” and “Scandinavian Skies,” the latter of which starts off promisingly, ultimately spin their wheels without adding anything of real substance to match what Joel pulls off in the first half. Joel has proven himself to be an exceptional architect of characters and mood, but incisive, politicized observation was never his sharpest tool, and the seams start to show after a while. “Where’s the Orchestra?” ends the record on a defeatist shrug, a man at a show that wasn’t what he expected, using theater as a metaphor for life. The idea is good. The execution, especially in tone, feels perfunctory.

If there’s an overarching issue with The Nylon Curtain, it’s the late-period Beatles influence that’s front and center. Joel’s acknowledged it openly, so it’s not like I’m speaking out of school here, but if you’re going to pay that kind of homage to that kind of band, it’s tough not to find yourself in a death-by-comparison situation if you don’t land the plane cleanly, and I don’t think Joel does that here. I appreciate the ambition and, overall, admire a lot of what he strives for song to song, but I can’t in good conscience put it up there with his best work. Joel has said he holds this album in higher esteem than The Stranger or 52nd Street, and there’s a growing segment of his fans that agree. But, in reality, it’s a strong half-album buried under thick dollops of pomp and circumstance.

7. The Bridge (1986)

In what became a theme for 1980s-era Billy Joel, The Bridge is mostly an exercise in hubris. It’s also more consistently entertaining than other records of his that have sold better and, somehow, garnered a much better reputation over the years. What that says about my taste, I’m not sure, but the confidence Joel writes and performs with here is off the charts and absolutely worth the price of admission.

Like a lot of mid-80s albums that I’ve written about, the production is where these songs show their age (see my Queen discography ranking for a few examples). It may have been a more cutting-edge, digital-first sound at the time, but there’s a flatness to the instrumentals that scrubs nearly all the emotional resonance out of the mix, prioritizing clean, smooth lines and surfaces instead. On one hand, it’s satisfying to hear the Swiss watch ticking away with as much precision as it does, but the trade-off is that the efficiency of the machine drains some of the life out of the material. If it were a bit looser and more carefree, you wouldn’t hear the gears turning as much.

What saves it from being a bore is Joel himself, both in front of and behind the mic. Even in the moments where he’s transparently riffing on other popular styles, the showmanship never wavers. “Running on Ice” sees him winking and nodding at Sting and the Police, transplanting a bass-forward minimalism to a New York setting. He pulls it off with enough conviction that the homage comes across as nothing short of loving. “Baby Grand” is a grand, showy duet with Ray Charles built on their shared reverence for the piano, and it works because Charles has an uncanny way of infusing such shameless gimmicks with boundless soul and elegance. “Big Man on Mulberry Street” turns Joel’s attention to a theatrical big-band arrangement that implies he had reached a point in his career where he could simply call whatever shot he wanted and no one would stop him.

And yet, those positives notwithstanding, the record was seen as a relative disappointment, commercially and creatively. Joel took the perceived failure hard, too, firing much of his band, severing ties with a lot of his production team, and taking his former manager to court. The Bridge didn’t cause any of that, but in retrospect, it reads like the beginning of a slippery slope to a career valley. It was also the last record to carry the Family Productions logo. Columbia’s president, Walter Yetnikoff, had finally pressured Artie Ripp into selling the publishing rights back to Joel. Fifteen years after signing that first catastrophic contract, Joel finally owned his own songs.

6. Piano Man (1973)

The secret here is as follows: Not only is Piano Man a hugely entertaining album, but the title track may be among its least impressive tracks.

Granted, it’s the song that most people continue to hear over bar or patio PA systems to this day, and if it’s your Billy Joel jam, I shan’t deprive you. But I do think it’s interesting that, even though it’s the track that initially made him famous, Joel has spent the better part of a half-century clowning on it publicly (see this conversation with Howard Stern as an example). To hear him describe it is to feel someone’s barely contained exasperation of how to play it over and over and over again for fans. Honestly, I get it. The song rambles, and the structure is more of a loop than a focused arc. What saves it is the specificity of the caricatures. The bartender named John, the real estate novelist, the piano man himself, each sketched only in a sentence or two, but they are all immediately recognizable as the kind of person you’ve met at least once. Joel was writing this portrait of losers with more compassion than condescension, and that instinct, more than anything else, makes the song stick.

The legacy of “Piano Man” tends to overshadow how great and how country the rest of the album is. It sits much closer to of-its-era Americana than what Joel’s artistic palette would evolve into. “Stop in Nevada” is this gem of a road song with a genuinely cinematic quality, tracing the geography of a woman leaving a relationship with wonderfully understated detail. “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” is even more ambitious, a sweeping narrative built on an orchestral arrangement that Joel would never attempt at this scale again. “You’re My Home” is a nice touch that conveys its sentiment without overreaching. These three tracks alone make the album worth more than its status as a footnote to the title track suggests.

The Columbia deal itself came about because of a song that would eventually end up on Piano Man, but, at the time, wasn’t yet recorded in a studio setting. A live radio performance of “Captain Jack” on Philadelphia’s WMMR in 1972 became the station’s most-requested song. This phenomenon caught the attention of the label’s promotions man, Herb Gordon, who brought it to then-president Clive Davis. Joel signed shortly thereafter, and the rest is history. The album peaked at No. 27 on the Billboard 200, and the title track reached No. 25 on the Hot 100. Modest numbers if you look at the scope of Joel’s career, but enough to keep him pushing toward the next industry milestone. The song was certified gold in 1975, though some Hollywood accounting left Joel with only $8,000 in actual royalties.

He was a proven hit-maker on paper and effectively broke in practice. That wouldn’t change for a while, either.

5. Turnstiles (1976)

This record is Joel’s true pivot point, and it sounds like one from the first note.

By 1976, he had moved back to New York and, for the first time in his career, recorded with the touring band he’d spent years building chemistry with on the road. Most notable among those players are drummer Liberty DeVitto, who’s been with him ever since, and bassist Doug Stegmeyer, who would also help anchor his sound for the next 15 years. The sonic upgrade from Streetlife Serenade to this LP is so noticeable, you kind of wonder why Joel hadn’t pulled the plug on the previous Los Angeles-based process that was clearly holding him back. Songs like the opener “Say Goodbye to Hollywood” ooze with this easy confidence, giving the arrangements momentum and gravitas in equal measure, all without ever coming across as strained. To the degree that Joel had swagger before, here’s where it finally kicked both doors down in one motion.

Not long after that moment comes probably my favorite Billy Joel song, “New York State of Mind.” It’s at the top of that list because, and maybe this will sound like an oversimplification, but it’s more than just a great song. Joel has plenty of those in his discography. What makes “State” special is that it serves as a wonderful declaration of identity. Through its layered, textural storytelling, you invited inside the mind of a man who’s, at long last, comfortable in his own skin as an iconoclast. He was done trying to fit into the idealized mold of a SoCal singer-songwriter and, relatedly, letting someone else’s ideas for him shape his music and career. To return to New York at a time when the city was broke and its luster had worn off significantly, and to find comfort in that homecoming, takes hutzpah. Joel flaunts his without apology.

What Turnstiles doesn’t get enough credit for is its range. Amid the full-throated rockers, you also get more nuanced tracks like “Summer, Highland Falls,” a quiet, aching ballad about someone who can’t find the middle ground between elation and misery. “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” is another highlight, a closer that finds an oddly satisfying lane as a sci-fi-cynicism piece that puts an exclamation point on his pro-New York stance. The piano playing across this record is worth singling out, too. It’s tighter and more varied than anything on his first three albums, folding in nods to jazz, classical, and R&B throughout. This album, more than any in Joel’s studio catalog, grows in stature the more you return to it, and the gap between what it sold initially and where it should stand now, legacy-wise, hasn’t been totally reconciled in the larger conversation about his career.

4. Glass Houses (1980)

When the research phase of this discography ranking turned its attention to Glass Houses, I kept reading that it was Joel’s hardest-rocking album. And, sure, that tracks … sort of. But that designation is also a great example of why genre categorization is kind of pointless. Is it rock? Is it pop? Is it closer to late-70s new wave? Maybe it’s even closer to an alternative scene that was bubbling over with fresh, exciting voices? Whatever you want to call it, the album is produced with a crisp, clean sensibility that keeps everything tightly wound without losing its sense of adventure or fun.

The most obvious comparison point for much of this tracklist is Elvis Costello, which is both a blessing and a complication. Joel pulls off that wiry, oddball rock vibe well on the deeper cuts, particularly “Sleeping with the Television On” and “Close to the Borderline,” both of which could’ve been hits for Costello, Joe Jackson, and several others who were thriving around the same time on college and FM radio. That energy also gives “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” its signature whimsical bounce. It’s kind of surprising that the track eventually became Joel’s first No. 1 on the Hot 100, only because it’s a bit mind-boggling that it didn’t happen sooner. It’s especially apropos since the song is a pointed defense of melodic, hook-centric songwriting that countered what Joel saw as the aestheticized aggression of punk. It feels genuine rather than calculated.

A couple of times, though, that alternative influence tips into thinner, more imitative territory. The closer, “Through the Long Night,” is the clearest example, a three-part harmony ballad that lands softer than much of the record around it and, for me, doesn’t put quite the exclamation mark on the album that you’d hope. What’s also worth honing in on, if purely for entertainment value, is the petulance running through all of Joel’s lyrics. He was pissed that critics kept treating him as a lightweight, and Glass Houses was his first serious attempt to shift that perception. He wasn’t wrong to try, but it’s funny to me that the record is still fundamentally a pop album, produced to a high sheen, full of melodic delights, and probably a bit too pleased with its own eccentricities to be taken seriously as a rebuke of his detractors. Unsurprisingly, critics didn’t warm to it.

Glass Houses reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and sold 7.1 million copies in the US, making it the 41st best-selling album of the entire decade (!). Joel also won a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, earning him the cultural currency he’d cash in for his next, more complicated studio effort. It marked the end of an era of sorts, as this was the last album to feature the original Billy Joel band lineup in full. Saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Richie Cannata departed before the Nylon Curtain sessions.

3. An Innocent Man (1983)

Part fizzy love story, part rose-colored nostalgia project, An Innocent Man is a record that’s pushed my buttons in the best way possible since I first heard it over 25 years ago. And, in the age of everything-is-a-pastiche pop culture that we live in now, it’s arguably aged better than almost everything in his catalog. It occupies a space in my heart right next to the Grease soundtrack, as a loving, expertly executed homage to a decade I wasn’t around to experience in real time, yet it still carries a wonderful aural mystique whenever you spend time with this tracklist. It always puts a smile on my face.

As I listened to more music and broadened my stylistic palette, I was able to hear all the references Joel was making with these songs. The funky “Easy Money” is his play on a Memphis soul strut reminiscent of Sam & Dave or Otis Redding. “The Longest Time” is a gorgeous throwback to late-1950s doo-wop, and the effervescent “Uptown Girl” apes Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons. In lesser hands, it might’ve come across as a cheap imitation, but because the craft is never in question, you stay with him every step of the way. It doesn’t hurt that Joel’s vocals are also among the best he’s ever recorded, particularly on the ballads and doo-wop numbers. If you’re looking for a deep cut to hang your hat on, “Leave a Tender Moment Alone” is a genuinely impressive love song.

Speaking of which, let’s pause for a moment and mention the record’s main character, Joel’s ex-wife, Christie Brinkley. They had fallen madly in love and, according to the pop star, the experience made him feel “like a teenager” all over again. “When you’re gonna write [songs for a new album], you write what you’re feeling. And I didn’t fight it. The material was coming so easily and so quickly, and I was having so much fun doing it […] I think within 6 weeks, I had written most of the material on the album.” Listen, if I were in his shoes and started dating (and later married) Christie Brinkley, I’d be pretty jazzed about it, too.

The album reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and went Platinum seven times over in the US, producing two No. 1 singles in the process. More than the familiarity with the songs and styles of a cherished, bygone era, I’d like to think that a big reason for this record’s commercial success is how energetic and infectious the performances are. After the self-seriousness of The Nylon Curtain, going back to basics and making a record for himself first, without trying to carry the weight of some outsized political statement on his shoulders or sneer at his detractors in the critical community, was the right call. You can debate whether it was a necessary reset or the beginning of a different creative calculus, but the honest answer is probably both.

He’s having the time of his life and it still sounds like it, more than 40 years later.

2. The Stranger (1977)

Similar to the Boss in 1975, this make-it-or-break-it scenario brought out the best in Billy Joel.

It didn’t look so great to begin with, however. Columbia was ready to drop him and saw this LP’s production cycle as his final chance to recapture at least some of the magic from Piano Man. While shopping around for a producer who could make that happen, Joel approached Beatles scion George Martin, but the legend ultimately passed on the opportunity because he wanted session musicians rather than Joel’s band. Instead, the Long Island native turned to Phil Ramone, who was coming off the Paul Simon success, Still Crazy After All These Years, and whose feel for a certain type of New York sophistication aligned with that Joel had been building for himself. Even with that built-in chemistry, I don’t think either man expected the resulting songs to become as transcendent as they have.

More than anything, the trust between the key personnel is the x-factor between the notes here. The entire album was completed in just three weeks, with Ramone doing his part to emphasize the livewire in-person chemistry that Joel and his band had spent countless hours honing on the road. It’s what drives earworms like “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “Only the Good Die Young,” and the criminally underrated “Get It Right The First Time,” the first two of which were Top 40 hits for Joel. Even its best-known song, “Just the Way You Are,” has this off-the-cuff lilt to it that draws you in from those first few iconic notes on the electric piano. That framing isn’t something you can fake with studio technology or multitrack smoke-and-mirrors. Sometimes, all you need is a motivated man and his piano.

The track that truly defines this album, at least for people like me who’ve spent considerable time with it, is “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” It’s essentially three different songs assembled into a single narrative arc, using the real-life backdrop of Fontana di Trevi, a restaurant near Carnegie Hall, as its setting. In seven minutes, you feel like you know these characters incredibly well. The lyrics move through romantic history, class aspiration, and the fond memories of one’s simpler, more youthful days and nights with such grace and ambition that I never tire of them. When it gets to the final minute or so, and it fades back to the present-day setting around the dinner table, it’s such a satisfying full-circle moment. If not Joel’s best song, then let’s call it his most cinematic achievement.

The Stranger was a runaway freight train right out of the gate. It spent six weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and was kept out of the top spot by another musical monolith, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The LP has since sold more than 10 million copies in the US alone, earning it Diamond certification, along with hundreds of millions of streams across all platforms. It also turned what Joel considered a “gloopy” afterthought of a ballad in the recording process into an award-winning single when “Just The Way You Are” won Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the 1978 Grammys. He may scoff at it now, as he does with several of his other hits, but it’s now considered an out-and-out pop standard. Not too shabby for an artist who was dangerously close to being an also-ran.

1. 52nd Street (1978)

Controversy! Or is it?

How surprising a pick this is for the top spot in Billy Joel’s will depend on your relationship with his other work. He’s got multiple A-tier albums to his name, so it’s not like you’d be “incorrect” to go with The Stranger or even Glass Houses in place of 52nd Street. But, in my defense, it was the release that became his first chart-topping LP and won him the Grammy for Album of the Year, beating out the likes of Frank Zappa, Bruce Springsteen, and those pesky, disco-fied Bee Gees. Justified or not, The Stranger wasn’t even nominated.

What I appreciate that much more about this record is that he really swings for the fences and, in practically any case, he connects. After selling tens of millions of records, it would’ve been extremely easy for him to trot out The Stranger, Pt. II, and it would’ve been a massive success, but he takes no small number of chances sonically. It starts with the titular reference to the Midtown Manhattan hub for jazz hotspots, an influence that he incorporates throughout this tracklist. You hear it in the opening of “Stiletto,” my favorite deep cut of his, as well as “Zanzibar,” which builds around a Freddie Hubbard flugelhorn solo and marries it with reggae, jazz, and rock without ever losing its footing. On this most recent listen, I immediately put that track on repeat before moving on through the rest of the album. My goodness, it’s so good.

Elsewhere, “Big Shot” is the best kind of venomous rock anthem, obliterating New York socialite culture with so much swagger that it makes you pine for more of that in Joel’s catalog (sadly, I don’t think he ever went that hard with a rock arrangement ever again). There’s also “My Life,” which became a staple on soft-rock radio in no small part because of its tie-in with the Tom Hanks sitcom Bosom Buddies. Finally, for one more song pick, I adore “Until the Night,” a sweeping piano epic that ranks up there with Elton John’s most compelling material in the same style. There’s a version of 52nd Street that, in someone else’s hands, becomes overly smug and polished. I’m a huge Steely Dan fan, for example, but consider what Fagen and Becker might have done with the same raw material, in the same New York setting. You’d have a much colder, more sealed-off end product, without the working-class appeal that keeps it grounded.

Beyond the worldwide sales (over 7 million at the time of this writing) and numerous industry accolades, 52nd Street also represents another very important first in music history. It was the first commercially released compact disc, launched by Sony in Japan on October 1, 1982. 52nd Street bore the catalog number 35DP-1, the first in the sequence. I don’t have to tell readers of this newsletter that, if you come across one sitting in a used record store bin anywhere in the world, it’s worth scooping a copy.

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