Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Billy Joel Available Now
Dynamic and open, with driving rhythmic energy – the best early pressings really bring this great batch of songs to life.
Jam packed with hits: An Innocent Man, The Longest Time, Tell Her About It, Uptown Girl, Leave a Tender Moment Alone, and more – seven singles in all.
The best sides have the huge soundstage and startling clarity and immediacy that characterizes this album, but they also add an ingredient missing from most of the copies we played — a full, rich, musical midrange!
On many pressings, the vocals can get hard and harsh on the more uptempo tracks.
“Uptown Girl” is a notable offender in this regard, and never sounds quite as good as the other tracks.
A prime example of an album in which the hit sounds worse than the rest of the album.
As you can see from the notes for our our most recent White Hot shootout winning copy, side one was doing everything right, and side two, where Uptown Girl can be found, was doing the best it could, all things considered.
Side One
Jumping out / weighty and rich / very full vocals and kick drum
Side Two
Three-dimensional vocals / jumping out / full and lively / much less hardness
The notes for side two point out that it less hard sounding than the typical pressing, and that, coupled with its many other desirable qualities, put it over the top and made it the winner for side two.
Other records that are good for testing midrange hardness can be found here.
Hey, want to find your own top quality copy?
Consider taking our moderately helpful advice concerning the pressings that consistently win our shootouts.
This record has been sounding its best for many years, in shootout after shootout, this way:
You know what’s unusual about these notes?
They’re the kind of notes we’ve never written for any Heavy Vinyl reissue, except for the one that won our shootout not long ago.
They are the kind of notes that make it clear to us what a sham the modern Heavy Vinyl pressing tends to be, even those that are reasonably well made.
Practically no modern record we’ve ever played has ever had anything even approaching this kind of big as life sound, and we doubt that more than a handful ever will. It sets a standard that modern remastered records simply cannot meet.
Side One
Easy Money
An Innocent Man
The Longest Time
This Night
Tell Her About It
Side Two
Uptown Girl
Careless Talk
Christie Lee
Leave a Tender Moment Alone
Keeping the Faith
AMG Review
… he’s effortlessly spinning out infectious, memorable melodies in a variety of styles, from the Four Seasons send-up “Uptown Girl” and the soulful “Tell Her About It” to a pair of doo wop tributes, “The Longest Time” and “Careless Talk.” Joel has rarely sounded so carefree either in performance or writing, possibly due to “Christie Lee” Brinkley, a supermodel who became his new love prior to An Innocent Man.
He can’t stop writing about her throughout the album — only three songs, including the haunted title track, aren’t about her in some form or fashion. That giddiness is infectious, helping make An Innocent Man an innocent delight that unwittingly closes Joel’s classic period.
An Innocent Man
In an interview about the making of the album, Joel talks about the fact that at the time that he was recording An Innocent Man, he was newly divorced from his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, and was single for the first time since achieving rock star status.
So he had the opportunity to date supermodels like Elle Macpherson and Christie Brinkley, and because of these experiences, he said, “I kind of felt like a teenager all over again.”And so he started writing songs in the same style as pop songs that he remembered from his teenage years, citing pop music from the late 1950s and early 1960s, including “early R&B songs and The Four Seasons, and the Motown music, soul music.”
Joel explained, “When you’re gonna write [songs for a new album], you write what you’re feeling. And I didn’t fight it. The material was coming so easily and so quickly, and I was having so much fun doing it. I was kind of reliving my youth. . . I think within 6 weeks I had written most of the material on the album.”
The album featured three Billboard Top 10 hit singles: “Tell Her About It”, which reached #1, “Uptown Girl”, which peaked at #3 and “An Innocent Man”, which peaked at #10.
Four other singles were released from the album: “The Longest Time” (number 14), “Leave a Tender Moment Alone” (number 27), “Keeping the Faith” (number 18) and “This Night” (US B-Side of “Leave a Tender Moment Alone”).
An Innocent Man remained on the U.S. Pop album chart for 111 weeks, becoming Joel’s longest charting studio album behind The Stranger.
Wikipedia