Joel and his producer, Phil Ramone (who engineered many New York- produced hits of the early 60's), have made a nearly perfect light summer album full of enthusiasm, excitement and joy. And his singing - the strongest and most ebullient of his career - bears out the message. In direct, slangy lyrics, he counsels emotional honesty and vulnerability over manipulation and mistrust. Joel contemplates what it means to fall in love in 1983, instead of 1963. The songs retain a contemporary perspective as Mr. And to his credit, he doesn't ever totally lose his identity, vocally or as a songwriter. Joel's imitations are entirely affectionate. Joel's mimicry of other singers, from Leon Russell to Bruce Springsteen, had a competitive, derisive edge to it. There have been times in the past when Mr. ''Tell Her About It,'' a high-spirited shuffle, compacts the studio styles of several mid-60's Motown hits. The chorus of ''This Night'' grafts a Beethoven melody onto a ''doo-wop'' arrangement with the same tacky glee with which many early 60's hits appropriated classical tunes. Joel's blatant flatteries, while other songs offer broader pastiches with less specific references.
King and the Drifters (''An Innocent Man''), Otis Redding (''Easy Money''), the Tymes (''The Longest Time''), and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (''Uptown Girl'') are the recipients of Mr. Joel's album is a collection of affectionate imitations of early 60's urban rock fashions, in which he and his band unabashedly parody the different early 60's vocal and arranging styles, with a strong emphasis on early soul music. Listen to some of the best new recordings here.įor all their surface similarities, however, ''An Innocent Man'' and ''Everybody's Rockin' '' are vastly different-sounding records. Classical Music: 2021 was a year of reawakening for the art form.Jazz Albums: Even the big-statement albums this year had a feeling of intense closeness.Pop Albums: Recordings with big feelings and room for catharsis made the most powerful connections.Best Songs: A posthumous political statement and a superstar’s 10-minute redo are among the 66 best tracks of 2021.Both records enshrine innocence and optimism as though they were a vanishing species of attitude.įrom Lil Nas X to Mozart to Esperanza Spalding here is what we loved listening to this year. Now they have turned around and made deeply- felt rock and roll roots albums that question high-technology record- making and the sophisticated attitudes that go with it. Young's ''Trans'' - each man tentatively tried to come to grips with the future by experimenting with the latest in synthesizer technology. Both seem caught between the past and present. Billy Joel and Neil Young, who are respectively 34 and 37, both grew up when rock and roll was at its peak of ferment and are now watching it be devoured by a monolithic video and computer culture. And the album's primitive rockabilly songs don't sound erotically subversive so much as quaintly evocative of an old-fashioned Southern rural na"ivete. Young is the picture of humble but determined concentration. Stooped over a guitar, his face bowed, Mr. On the cover of Neil Young's newest album, ''Everybody's Rockin','' (Geffen GHS 40l3), the singer, dressed in a shiny white suit, his hair slicked backed Elvis Presley-style, strikes a classic rockabilly pose. Indeed, the album's 10 songs, which pay homage to the 1955- 65 era of pop records, exalt that bygone time when courtship rituals and sexual roles were far more clearly defined than they are today. Yet the very title of Billy Joel's new album, ''An Innocent Man'' (Columbia BL 38837), implies the same dewy-eyed romanticism that Glenn Miller's ''Moonlight Serenade'' symbolizes to an older generation. I'm a tech and work on cars as my job and I wanna be like him in the video Comment by Nature Babyįirst time i saw this video I wanted to marry a mechanic like those in the video.How relative is that quality in a cultural artifact that we call innocence! In the late 1950's and early 1960's, the era that has been labelled ''the golden age of rock and roll,'' rock was suspected by many of being morally subversive for its sexual suggestiveness. Ok I love this song ? Comment by Slippin' Jimmy