![]() ![]() ![]() The Stranger works because Joel knows his territory firsthand. ![]() One indication that this is a real world that confronts us is the fact that none of these songs could possibly be sung convincingly by the thirty-four-year-old classically trained actor who plays "Fonze," either of the young Beverly Hills matrons who play "Laverne" or "Shirley," or any of the other commercially confected personalities from Fernwood and beyond that the media have been offering up to satisfy that strange new longing for blue-collar times and places that never were. True, it has a directness that Proust would probably have found appalling, but it gives the listener a unique opportunity to get into the head and feelings of a now grown-up ex-greaser through a group of songs that are at once a love letter and a farewell to youth, by turns touching, mordant, funny, gross (new sense), melodramatic, and naive. The title of Billy Joel's newest release, The Stranger, may echo the Albert Camus novel, but once into it you soon discover that it is much more like a "Remembrance of Things Pasta," an Italian-American nostalgia trip. ![]()
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