SONG OF THE DAY

“Scenes From An Ital­ian Restau­rant” by Billy Joel (The Stranger, Colum­bia Records, 1977). Writ­ten by Billy Joel.

MY TAKE

First, I love how Billy Joel looks like a hoodrat in that photo I chose. Ridicu­lous. Now for serious…

This song was prob­a­bly milling around my world for a decade or so before I really took notice of it. The turn­ing point for me get­ting into this song is actu­ally kind of strange: my cousin Brian’s high school grad­u­a­tion a few years ago had a kid play this on piano dur­ing the pro­ceed­ings. Weird choice of song dur­ing a high school grad­u­a­tion, I thought at the time, though now that I know the lyrics it totally makes sense, espe­cially when you get to the lyrics of “The Bal­lad Of Brenda & Eddie”, i.e. sec­tion 3 of the song. What really struck me was that this kid in Brian’s grad­u­at­ing class had obvi­ous piano skills and totally killed the song. I didn’t even see it live, I watched a crappy video tap­ing of it—if that isn’t proof enough for you that the per­for­mance by this young one rocked, I don’t know what is.

This song has all of my favorite things in it: lay­ers, inter­est­ing instru­ments that defy the genre (accor­dion, brass, sax solo), great lyrics, a bridge that totally goes through the roof, melody and tempo changes, and the abil­ity to draw out of its per­former an emo­tional per­for­mance. Hon­estly I think this song would have been ter­rific if it was just a piano solo, but I’m grate­ful that Billy Joel and his pro­ducer stepped eight lev­els past ter­rific and came up with this com­plex masterwork.

INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)

- “Scenes from an Ital­ian Restau­rant” is a song from Billy Joel’s 1977 and fifth stu­dio album, The Stranger. While his four pre­vi­ous albums had been mod­er­ate chart suc­cesses, this was his break­through album, spend­ing six weeks at #2 in the U.S. album charts. It remains Joel’s best-selling non-compilation album to date.

- Although never released as a sin­gle, it has become one of Joel’s most cel­e­brated com­po­si­tions among fans, appear­ing on most of his com­pi­la­tion albums.

- The song is effec­tively a med­ley of three indi­vid­ual songs which are fused together. In an inter­view, Joel cites the sec­ond side of The Bea­t­les album Abbey Road as one of the main influ­ences behind it. The song starts with a gen­tle melod­ic piano bal­lad, which sets the scene of two old class­mates in an Ital­ian restau­rant, mov­ing on to a tri­umphant and uptem­po jazz-influenced piece in the mid­dle, with a clar­inet and sax­o­phone solo, which then segues into a rock and roll sec­tion (which Joel refers to as “The Bal­lad of Brenda and Eddie”).

- At 7 min­utes and 37 sec­onds, it is the longest of Joel’s stu­dio cuts.

- This album over­took Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Trou­bled Water album to become the best-selling album on the Colum­bia Records imprint at the time.

- Gen­er­ally regarded as Joel’s finest work, in 2003, the album was ranked num­ber 67 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 great­est albums of all time.

- Since releas­ing his first hit song, “Piano Man”, in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling record­ing artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, accord­ing to the RIAA.

- Joel had Top 10 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and has 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote singlehandedly.

- He is also a six-time Grammy Award win­ner, a 23-time Grammy nom­i­nee and has sold over 100 mil­lion records worldwide.

- He was inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006) and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009).

- Joel “retired” from record­ing pop music in 1993 but con­tin­ues to tour (often with Elton John).

- Billy has a sis­ter, Judith Joel, and a half-brother, Alexander Joel, who is an acclaimed clas­si­cal con­duc­tor in Europe, cur­rently chief musi­cal direc­tor of the Staat­sthe­ater Braunschweig.

- Joel’s father was an accom­plished clas­si­cal pianist.

- Joel has ban­ners in the rafters of the Times Union Center, Nassau Coliseum, Madison Square Garden, Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, CT, Wachovia Cen­ter in Philadel­phia, and Hart­ford Civic Cen­ter in Hartford.

- He has also spon­sored the Billy Joel Vis­it­ing Com­poser Series at Syra­cuse University.

- Joel is the only per­form­ing artist to have played both Yan­kee and Shea Sta­di­ums, as well as Giants Stadium.

VIDEO OF THE DAY