Retro Spins: Billy Joel - Storm Front

I'm not a big Billy Joel fan, which is ironic, because I own eleven of his thirteen studio albums, one greatest hits and one live album. In my defense, the majority of them were picked up from dollar bins during a phase where I was actively trying to get introduced to popular singers / bands which I overlooked in the 70's and 80's.

When looking into the history of this album, as I often do when listening to a CD, it was interesting to find that for as long as Joel has been recording / releasing music, he only has three number one hits. One of which is We Didn't Start The Fire from Storm Front - A classic, if not slightly confusing, song. As a point of reference, his other two number one hits were, Still Rock and Roll To Me from his 1980 Glass Houses album and Tell Her About It from his 1983 An Innocent Man album.

For being such a highly acclaimed album, I was actually surprised there were only a handful of songs I liked from it. One of them was, of course, We Didn't Start the Fire, as well as, I Go To Extremes. My favorite from the record is by far, Downeaster 'Alexa'. I love the story the latter track tells, and quite frankly, it's a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned.

Despite its minimal appeal to me, I still look forward to actually delving further into the massive collection of Billy Joel albums I own. It's no secret the man has hits. We are, after all, talking about a singer / songwriter / multi-instrumental man who has fifteen compilation discs under his belt to compliment his career. Shoot, when you have more compilations than studio albums, there's got to be something about you people like, right?

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