Songs in the Attic
Artist: Billy Joel
Community Score: 10.00

Having scored three multi-platinum hits in a row, Billy Joel took a breather, releasing his first live album, Songs in the Attic, as he worked on his ambitious follow-up to Glass Houses. Joel wisely decided to use the live album as an opportunity to draw attention to songs from his first four albums. Apart from "Piano Man," none of those songs... Read More

The Stranger
Artist: Billy Joel
Community Score: 9.60

Billy Joel teamed with Phil Ramone, a famed engineer who had just scored his first producing hits with Art Garfunkel's Breakaway and Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years for The Stranger, his follow-up to Turnstiles. Joel still favored big, sweeping melodies, but Ramone convinced him to streamline his arrangements and clean up the... Read More

Glass Houses
Artist: Billy Joel
Community Score: 9.00

The back-to-back success of The Stranger and 52nd Street may have brought Billy Joel fame and fortune, even a certain amount of self-satisfaction, but it didn't bring him critical respect, and it didn't dull his anger. If anything, being classified as a mainstream rocker -- a soft rocker -- infuriated him, especially since a generation of punks... Read More

An Innocent Man
Artist: Billy Joel
Community Score: 8.57

Recording The Nylon Curtain exhausted Billy Joel, and even though it had a pair of major hits, it didn't rival its predecessors in terms of sales. Since he labored so hard at the record, he decided it was time for a break -- it was time to record an album just for fun. And that's how his homage to pre-Beatles pop, An Innocent Man, was conceived:... Read More

Moondance/His Band & Street Choir
Artist: Van Morrison
This Is Where I Came In
Artist: Van Morrison

This umpteenth repackaging of Van Morrison's Bang Records material is notable for containing the most complete set of the recordings yet issued on a single disc. Fifteen tracks are crammed onto this LP, which constitutes the entire set of Bang masters with the exception of the B-side single "Chick-A-Boom." (This Is Where I Came In was superseded... Read More

The John Lennon Collection
Artist: John Lennon
Community Score: 8.60

This 15-song collection (expanded to 19 in 1989 for the CD), released just short of two years after Lennon's death, provided a very generous overview of his solo career on a single LP, drawing on most of the major singles and also on songs that were widely covered, and from all periods of his career, from his late-Beatles-era solo political... Read More