'The Stranger'

The ratio of record : record cover is way off. The Stranger is a great album. The cover art sucks. Billy Joel awkwardly sitting on a bed staring at a mask placed on a pillow. Then there's boxing gloves hanging on the wall. Ridiculous.

Yes, this is an extremely good album. It has two of my favorite all-time Joel songs, "Movin' Out" and "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant." The latter wasn't even a single from the album despite it being the best song on the album. I assume it was like "Piano Man" and not editable to three minutes.

What I like about "Scenes ..." is that its about former lovers meeting back up again at their favorite Italian restaurant. It's a highly sentimental song at this point. The narrator -- Joel -- tells the woman to get a "table by the street"

The narrator then goes into an upbeat chorus thing -- there are three stages to the song, which is what makes it good -- when he quickly updates the girl on his life -- a new job, a new office, a new wife and the family, well, is fine.

Then he seemingly updates his girl about what happened to Brenda and Eddie, the king and the queen of the prom, who got married out of high school and wound up breaking up because Brenda lived beyond Eddie's means, although, the break-up seemed pretty amicable.

The song reverts back to the scene at the Italian restaurant. The narrator tells us that there's nothing more to say about Brenda and Eddie because he's told us already.

I've wondered one thing: What if the couple meeting at the restaurant were actually Brenda and Eddie. I know, this doesn't make sense. Why would the narrator -- as the song goes back to the restaurant -- mention Brenda and Eddie in third person? Still, it's good to think about.

What I like best about Joel is no one is more jaded than him. I complained about George Lucas' film American Graffiti as being sentimental, shortsighted and painted with a pair of rose-colored glasses on. Joel told the same stories, but he was no where near as rosy and kind.

He admits that people in his generation -- that of American Graffiti -- where naive and dumb. He knew that it was all going to blow up in their faces with time and it did just that with Vietnam and the 1960s and drugs. Joel saw all of these as game changers and they broke the spirit of the youth of the United States for good.

Joel's love songs -- "She's Always A Woman" and "Just The Way You Are" -- are dark and brooding. Not exactly the glowing ballads from Lennon-McCartney. You almost coming away wondering if the women in these songs aren't total bitches.