In praise of Billy Joel

For better or worse, Billy Joel is Long Island's most towering contribution to the pop music canon. His angry-young-man pose and musical theater flair made him a reflection of Bruce Springsteen for New York's southeastern suburbs, with their shared affinity for semidefiant stances, worn-on-the-sleeve wistfulness, and showy melodrama.

But with a lavish reissue of his 1977 album, The Stranger, and a defensively fawning Times profile serving as a prelude to this week's pair of shows at Shea Stadium, one wonders if it isn't the right time to look at Joel's body of work as more than "okay if you're stuck in a traffic jam on the LIE."

Sure, there's no excusing the Peter Gabriel-gone-dorm-room excess of "River Of Dreams," or the superficial boomer gloss given to history by "We Didn't Start the Fire." But Joel has spun a few songs that even the most hardened rock critic can probably admit to enjoying.

Following are 10 of them worth revisiting, if only for the purpose of preparing for Joel's perhaps inevitable Rick Rubin–produced, Britt Daniel–assisted "comeback" album.

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Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway), 1976
The Springsteen model, only tweaked, turned up, and transformed into a fairy tale of post-apocalyptic New York. (Although on Wednesday night at Shea Stadium, Joel almost sunk the whole thing by awkwardly sticking in a lyric about the Mets—for the purposes of parity, since there's a line that uses the word "Yankees" in a semifavorable way.)