The Stranger (album)

Prior to The Stranger, Billy Joel was on the verge of being dropped by his record label Columbia Records. Despite the unexpected success of Joel's second album Piano Man, his subsequent albums had failed to attain particularly impressive sales numbers. Turnstiles, Joel's most recent studio release at the time, had only peaked at number 122 on the Billboard 200 chart, leaving Joel in danger of being dropped by CBS if his next release did not perform well.[1]

By 1976, Joel had formed a reliable touring band consisting of Doug Stegmeyer on bass, Liberty DeVitto on drums and Richie Cannata on saxophone, flute, clarinet and organ. Joel grew to heavily appreciate this group of musicians, finding that they had a high-energy, rough-around-the-edges feel that he hoped to capture in his studio recordings. Joel had mostly worked with session players for his first three studio albums, which contained only scattered contributions from his own backup musicians, and strongly disliked the polished sound of these albums. During the production of Turnstiles, his fourth album, Joel initially worked with veteran producer Jim Guercio, who had him work with members of Elton John's band; dissatisfied with the results, Joel instead opted to self-produce the album and record with his own touring band. Joel was likewise set on recording his fifth studio album with this band. Having written some new material for the record,[3] Joel proceeded to seek out a producer who would be able to cultivate the style that he was looking for. A long-time fan of the Beatles, Joel initially looked to famed Beatles producer George Martin to produce his album. After meeting with Joel, Martin expressed interest in producing the album, but did not want to use Joel's band, wishing instead to bring in session players. Joel, however, was adamant in his desire to record with his own band and declined Martin's offer. Ultimately, Joel turned to Phil Ramone, a veteran New York City sound engineer and record producer who had recently worked with Paul Simon, another singer-songwriter, on Simon's album Still Crazy After All These Years. According to Joel, he and Ramone met with each other at Fontana di Trevi, an Italian restaurant located near Carnegie Hall where Joel had been playing at the time. The restaurant would eventually go on to inspire the setting of "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", a song on The Stranger. According to Joel, Ramone expressed an appreciation for Joel's band and their energy, and understood the reasoning behind Joel's attitude towards recording, which ultimately led Joel to choose Ramone as the producer for his next album.[3][4]

The recording sessions for The Stranger, described by Joel as "a blast" to be a part of,[5] took place across the short span of three weeks in between July and August 1977.[6] The album contains nine songs, four of which were released as singles in North America. The songs were all recorded with Joel alongside his band which he had formed while touring, in addition to various other musicians who were brought into the studio for specific songs.[4] Despite the formation of Joel's band, the songs on The Stranger didn't feature any consistent guitarists, with different players instead featuring in each song, and according to Joel, the reason for the initial lack of a constant guitarist was because it was hard to find the right one.[3] The photograph on the back cover of the album, featuring Joel, Ramone (donning a Yankees shirt at the time of the picture) and each of the band members, was taken at the Supreme Macaroni Company, one of several restaurants where the group would go to "have these crazy lunches and dinners."[4]

The opening song, "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," centers around Anthony, a grocery-store employee from Long Island who "dreams of making it big," receiving pressure from his family to move out and go his own way.[6] Joel stated in a Q&A session that he initially wrote the song's lyrics to the tune of the song 'Laughter in the Rain' by Neil Sedaka, doing so without even realizing the similarity until it was brashly pointed out the next day by drummer Liberty DeVitto. Not wanting to waste all of the words he had come up with, Joel rewrote the song, coming up with a new melody that fit with the lyrics.[7] The album's title track, according to Joel, was written by him without any core themes in mind and could be open up to interpretation, though he stated that it could be seen as a song about a man with schizophrenia.[8] While composing the song, Joel whistled the track's signature theme for Ramone, claiming that he (Joel) needed to find an instrument to play it. Ramone told Joel that the whistling he did was perfect, and thus it was kept in the final recording.[6] According to Joel in an interview with The Today Show, the percussive rhythm used in the song came about while he was toying around with an Ace Tone Rhythm Ace drum machine, which contained a drum beat that he heard while scrolling through the machine's library of rhythm tracks. After hearing the beat, he thought that the rhythm would be nice to fool around with, and wrote the song shortly afterwards.[8] "Just the Way You Are" was inspired by Joel's love for his wife at the time, Elizabeth Weber. He stated on a SiriusXM broadcast in 2016 that the melody came to him in a dream while he was working on The Stranger. He forgot about the melody shortly afterwards, but it came back to him while he was in a business meeting.[9] Joel originally considered keeping the song off the album, as he dismissed it as a "gloppy ballad" that was out-of-place compared to the rest of the album. Ramone disagreed, and brought Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow into the studio to prove that it was worth including. Upon hearing the song, the two artists both praised it, thus convincing him to feature the song.[6] The seven-and-a-half-minute epic "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", which follows a pair of young lovers from Long Island named Brenda and Eddie who go through a failed marriage, is 3 different, shorter songs- "The Italian Restaurant Song", "Things Are OK in Oyster Bay" and "The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie."[6] Joel stitched the three songs together, inspired by the similar approach taken with side two of The Beatles' Abbey Road[10] and by Freddie Mercury and Queen with "Bohemian Rhapsody", while Ramone helped intertwine them with backing orchestration.[9]

The song "Vienna", which opens up the album's b-side, got inspiration from Joel's trip to Vienna, Austria, where he went a few years after starting his career in musicianship to visit his father. While there, he found that Austrians had a vastly different outlook on life than the one he was familiar with in America. As he recalls, Joel had this realization after taking notice of an old woman sweeping out on the city streets, telling his father that he pitied the woman for having to do such a menial and unimportant task; Joel's father responded by lamenting that the woman was giving herself a sense of worth by doing a service that helped everyone rather than "sitting at home wasting away."[6] Joel tried to make the song itself Viennese in nature, comparing it specifically to something from a European 3-penny opera.[9] "Only The Good Die Young," which is sung from the point-of-view of a boy trying to appeal to an abstinent Catholic woman, was inspired by a girl named Virginia Davis who Joel had a crush on in high school. According to Joel, he saw Davis looking at him while he was playing in his high school band, The Echoes, which was the event that had him "completely hooked" to the prospect of being a musician.[4] "Only The Good Die Young" was written by Joel while opening for The Beach Boys in Knoxville, Tennessee, at which point it sounded slower-pace and more akin to a reggae tune, with Joel even singing the song's lyrics in a Jamaican accent. The mood of the song was shifted at the insistence of drummer Liberty DeVitto, who reportedly said to Joel "Why are you singing like that? The closest you've been to Jamaica was the Long Island Rail Road!" Ramone suggested that the song be played as a straight-four piece while DeVitto played a shuffle beat, a proposition which Joel found he enjoyed the sound of despite the concept initially seeming "odd and clunky." The song featured guitar playing by Hugh McCracken, a famous session player who Ramone brought in.[4] "She's Always a Woman", like "Just the Way You Are," was written about Elizabeth Weber, described by Joel as "a commentary on women in business being persecuted and insulted."[6] Joel tried to stylize the song as one which would be sung by Gordon Lightfoot.[9] "Get It Right The First Time" is inspired by the challenge of first meeting and confronting a person, highlighting the importance of not flubbing such an encounter and "gett[ing] it right the first time."[11] The album's final song, "Everybody Has a Dream," a gospel-influenced piece, was also inspired by Joel's wife. The song closes the album out with a reprise of the whistled theme from "The Stranger."[6]

The Stranger spent 17 weeks in varying positions within Billboard 200 chart's top 10 albums, first entering the bottom position on January 21, 1978 (around four months after its initial release). A month later, on February 18, the album reached its peak position at number 2 on the chart — only kept from the top spot by the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever — and remained there for six more weeks. The second single from the album, "Just The Way You Are," peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart,[6] having received a boost in popularity following Joel's performance of the song on an episode of Saturday Night Live.[12] The other three singles were all top 40 hits, with "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" and "She's Always A Woman" both peaking at number 17. While "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" was the first single released for the album, radio stations put little attention towards it, instead expressing interest in "Just the Way You Are"; thus, the latter song was released just six weeks following the debut of "Movin' Out", after which it achieved far larger success. The single for "Movin' Out" was later rereleased, after which it achieved higher success and ultimately became a hit.[13] According to Joel, "Only the Good Die Young" sold poorly when it was first put out as a single; however, following the song's release, Christian groups and archdiocese areas began calling for the song to be banned on several radio stations across the nation. The controversy helped raise the song's popularity, particularly among rebellious youth according to Joel, and the single thus fared much better as a result, ultimately peaking at number 24 in the US singles chart.[14][15] The Stranger remains one of Joel's best-selling original studio albums to date, achieving a "Diamond" certification for surpassing sales of 10 million units.[14] At the time, it had surpassed Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water to become Columbia Records’ best-selling album release.[16]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[17]
American Songwriter	[18]
Blender	[19]
The Buffalo News	[20]
Record Collector	[21]
Rolling Stone	[22]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[23]
Slant Magazine	[24]
Uncut	[25]
The Village Voice	B−[26]

The Stranger was well-received by critics, particularly in retrospect, with many considering it to display some of Joel's best-written material. In a contemporary review of the album, Ira Mayer of Rolling Stone deemed it an improvement over Joel's previous studio efforts, praising its musical variety and Ramone's production.[27] In a less enthusiastic review, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau held the album slightly above Joel's previous works; speaking specifically of Joel himself, he wrote that the artist had "more or less grown up" with what he considered less egotistical songwriting, and that he is "now as likeable as your once-rebellious and still-tolerant uncle who has the quirk of believing that OPEC was designed to ruin his air-conditioning business."[26]

Retrospectively, Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine described The Stranger as "a concept album of sorts, an ode to the singer's native New York underscored by his paranoid obsession (and resistance) to change." He called the album "a rejection of the American Dream," highlighting the pessimism expressed in some of its songs' lyrics.[24] Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic praised The Stranger as a highlight of Joel's discography, noting that its lyrical shortcomings are outweighed by Joel's musical flair, and ultimately concluding that Joel "rarely wrote a set of songs better than those on The Stranger, nor did he often deliver an album as consistently listenable."[17] Rolling Stone ranked The Stranger at number 67 on its 2003 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.[28] It also placed on the 2012 and 2020 editions of the list at numbers 70 and 169, respectively.[29][30] In 2000, The Stranger was voted number 246 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.[31]

As his breakthrough album, The Stranger kicked off a long string of successful albums for Joel, continuing up through 1993's River of Dreams. George Martin, who had initially declined to produce The Stranger using Joel's band, reportedly wrote Joel a letter following the album's massive success, in which he congratulated Joel and reflected that he was wrong about the band.[32] Phil Ramone would continue to serve as Joel's producer for a number of years, working with him on each of his albums up through 1986's The Bridge. "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" went on to lend its name to a 2002 jukebox musical, featuring several of Joel's songs alongside narrative choreography by Twyla Tharp. The play ran successfully on Broadway for three years, holding its final performance on December 15, 2005 after a total of 1,303 performances.[33] In 2017, to celebrate the album's 40th anniversary, a picture-disc vinyl rerelease of The Stranger with newly-remastered audio was released by Brookville Records on October 20.[34]

Many of the songs from the album went on to become staples in Joel's repertoire. Though never released as a single, "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" is a staple of his live set, named by Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield as Joel's equivalent to Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland".[6][35] Joel stated in an interview that "I don't think I could do a show without performing that song."[10] "Vienna" has also become a popular part of his live set; when Joel lets the audience choose between it and "Just the Way You Are," "Vienna" is most often the winning contender.[36] The song was featured in an episode of the TV series Taxi,[37] and was prominently showcased later on in the 2004 teenage comedy film 13 Going on 30. Joel has cited "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" and "Vienna" as his favorite and 5th-favorite songs that he has written, respectively.[36]

All songs written and composed by Billy Joel.

Live at Carnegie Hall June 3, 1977

• Billy Joel – vocals, acoustic piano and synthesizers
• Richie Cannata – saxophones and keyboards
• Howie Emerson – electric and acoustic guitars
• Doug Stegmeyer – Fender bass
• Liberty DeVitto – drums
• Recorded by David Hewitt using Record Plant NY Remote Truck.

Grammy Awards

• List of best-selling albums in the United States

• The Stranger (Adobe Flash) at Radio3Net (streamed copy where licensed)