Songoftheday 2/14/13 - Listen boy, don't want to see you let a good thing slip away, you know I don't like watching anybody make the same mistakes I made...

Billy Joel - "Tell Her About It"
from the album An Innocent Man (1983)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 15

Today's Song of the Day is by singer/songwriter/piano man Billy Joel, who had success in 1982 with his ambitious eighth album, The Nylon Curtain, which gave him two top-40 hits with "Pressure" and "Allentown", and remains my favorite Joel album to date. He then went on a short tour, in which one of the shows was recorded for broadcast on cable and VHS. But the serious tone of the record and sonically challenging production made the album a little less palatable to mainstream radio, even though the set still made the top-10 on the albums chart.

On his next release, An Innocent Man, Joel did a 180 from the last record by recording a set of retro-sounding tracks and vibrant love songs that became his most successful album of the 80s. The first single,  "Tell Her About It", sounds as if it were ripped from mid-sixties Motown and transplanted to the modern day, with help from producer Phil Ramone...

"Tell Her About It" became Billy's second #1 pop hit in the US in the fall of 1983, as well as his third to top the adult-contemporary (soft-rock) chart. The single also reached the top-20 on the rock radio format, and after all that time became Joel's first top-10 hit in Britain, peaking at #4 (it also went top-10 in Australia and Canada).

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


...here's Billy live in Wembley Stadium in London in 1984 on tour...

Joel's An Innocent Man album would go on to spin off five more top-40 hits, and be nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year, unfortunately in the field including Michael Jackson's Thriller, so you know who'd win there. It also was one of the first CD's I ever bought way way back in the day.

Up tomorrow: British rockabilly journeyman gets going with some help from an Electric Light.