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Paula - 2007-07-11 12:37:11
The comments seem to be working now. Yay.
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Alan - 2007-07-11 13:40:52
Spoon does not fail to bring it live, if you take your energy legs down there you will most likely be in for a treat.
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Greg - 2007-07-11 13:56:20
I think El Cantante will swim or sink by the prominence of the music, which is unequaled. If the music is buried in melodrama, as is often the case in biopics, it will be painful. Focus on the music and his voice and it could be transcendent.
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tris mccall - 2007-07-11 14:47:26
the new one really sounds like billy joel. i love billy joel, so i am not complaining. spoon does not have billy joel's storytelling ability or knack for weirdly engrossing schtick, but britt daniel is a much better singer. well, mayor bloomberg is probably a better singer than billy joel is, so that couldn't have been hard. anyway: good. as good as *streetlife serenade* or *piano man* or something like that.
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Paula - 2007-07-11 14:59:17
I have intensely mixed feeling about Billy. He is, without a doubt, a technically gifted songwriter. He can rhyme, he can write stirring ballads, upbeat pop things. He has good ideas. He wrote that damn Brenda and Eddy song, which is just great.
On the other hand, he is just so godawful smarmy and smug and gross. It's hard to separate those two things.
On the third hand, I also find it hard to separate the concept of Billy Joel from my feelings for my oldest sister and her husband. Billy Joel's music is like the soundtrack of their courting and entire relationship, starting back in the '70s, and those two are like a second pair of parents for me.
This is getting long and complicated, but suffice to say, Billy carries some iconic weight in my psyche that precludes simple liking or disliking.
But, yeah, Spoon!
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Tom G. - 2007-07-11 15:46:41
the new one really sounds like billy joel.
Wow, really? Do you mean the whole album or The Ghost of You Lingers? They sound an awful lot like The Strokes to me. (Or maybe that should be The Strokes sound like Spoon?) But I can't find a Billy Joel sound other than some piano in the first few songs. (I like most of Billy Joel's stuff, especially Nylon Curtain.)
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Paula - 2007-07-11 16:24:41
Brit Daniel's songwriting is a little more subtle than the Strokes'. I think Tris was being....Tris-like (a mix of facetious and eccentric...faccentric?) in his comparison, and I just ran with it b/c I am chatty today.
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Baby Party - 2007-07-11 18:08:39
I generally dislike Billy Joel. But when I was ten, in 1973, I listened to the Piano Man album about a gajillion times, enthralled. It was the soundtrack to a fantasy I had about running away with my science teacher and living on the Russian steppe in a kind of Paper Moon-type relationship. In other versions of this fantasy, we were hiding from the Nazis. I did hear Big Shot on the radio recently and I thought, "wow, that's a terrific song, and a cool guitar solo."
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tris mccall - 2007-07-11 23:58:35
no, really -- it reminds me of billy joel, honest injun. especially the underdog. but you know me, i've got some funny ideas about what sounds like what.
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2fs - 2007-07-12 00:20:59
haven't heard the new Spoon yet (or the new Interpol, as long as we're being all big-new-indie), because I'm currently buried under two large piles of new-acq. CDs - one from an indie record company that was selling 20 CDs (their choice) for 20 bucks; the other because Lala.com burped when I went over to two different friends' pages there and started want-listing every title either of them had that I was remotedly interested in. Whammo - nearly 40 CDs. (Half the label things were screamo-metally crap - but hey, 10 CDs for 20 bucks is still a really good deal.)
What was I saying? Oh yeah: Paula, you nailed the Billy Joel thing completely. It's as if he's always going, check this out - now I'm going to write *this* kind of song - pretty cool, isn't it?
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Greg - 2007-07-12 10:02:25
My sister ruined Billy Joel for me through repeated plays of The Stranger.. but he never really shook me anyway. I read an interesting interview with him a few years ago--it seemed to be an exercize in self loathing and second guessing. He spoke of all these newer bands that he loved and how he wished he could write like them--and then went down a list of his own albums and songs that he was ashamed of. It was painful to read.
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