In the wake of Billy Joel’s Madison Square Garden residency, I have been thinking a lot about his musical legacy — both in my life and in pop culture.
In honor of its approaching 42nd anniversary, I revisited the singer-songwriter’s eighth studio album, “The Nylon Curtain.” The 1982 album was conceptualized as Joel’s crowning achievement and it is difficult to deny how much his ambition pays off.
The first single on the album, “Pressure,” describes a central theme: feeling completely lost and incapable of living up to both internally and externally imposed expectations. Joel sings “All grown up and nowhere to go” with a synth-rock backtrack that aptly sounds like mounting pressure. He acts as the recipient of bad, surface-level advice from people who have not experienced hardship (“Now here you are with your faith/And your Peter Pan advice/You have no scars on your face/And you cannot handle pressure”) and the giver of this same advice (“I’ll tell you what it means/Pressure…Don’t ask for help/You’re all alone”). This brings in a second thematic drive of the album: pointless cycles that do nothing to resolve internal conflicts.
I would be lying if I said that Joel’s “Allentown” did not factor into my interest in the Lehigh Valley during my college search. Joel is clearly a talented musician and composer (I mean, he’s The Piano Man), but I have always thought of him first and foremost as a storyteller — a label perfectly shown in this song.
Describing a generational gap that coincided with the decline of the steel manufacturing industry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Joel sings “Well, we’re waiting here in Allentown/For the Pennsylvania we never found/For the promises our teachers gave/If we worked hard, if we behaved.” The song explores themes of disillusionment with the American Dream, a broken cycle of hope and the romanticization of their parents’ lives. It comes together with a musicality taking inspiration from the repetitiveness of life and drawing attention to the dreariness of post-modern suburbia, topped off with an upbeat sound, a steam whistle, clanking metal and chugging vocals.
“Goodnight Saigon” is a seven-minute-long representation of the U.S. Marine experience during the Vietnam War, inspired by Joel’s friends. This song feels very nostalgic to me: I love how simple the track begins before growing into a full production, backed by more singers. His vocals fall somewhere between a rock song and a campfire song, giving the feeling of an intimate recap of a soldier’s time in the war as he asks “Who was wrong?/Who was right?/It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight.”
Revisiting “The Nylon Curtain,” I realized how closely it aligns with senior-year anxieties. Joel, who never attended college and was 33 years old at the time of the album’s release, stands at a crossroads. He is not only scared of where he is in life, but of the world he exists in — something that feels familiar knowing you have just one year in between college and the rest of your life.
Joel feels an overwhelming sense of responsibility to do the right thing, but cannot seem to figure out how to do it. He asks “Who could say/What was left and where was right?” He emphasizes the cyclic nature of people letting each other down and the fickleness of fate, saying that it should not surprise you because “the sins of the fathers/are the sins of the sons.” He keeps a fast, strong tempo throughout the album, mirroring his growing anxieties that pour into the slower, more somber final song “Where’s the Orchestra?” where he muses “I assumed that the show would have a song/So I was wrong” as a metaphor for adult life not being as grand and easy to navigate as he once believed.
I do not think “The Nylon Curtain” solves any of these problems, nor does it try to. “Where’s the Orchestra?” ends with the same melody as the album’s opener, “Allentown,” bringing us right back into the cycle. Joel emphasizes the shared experience of not knowing what to do with your life and, through this open acknowledgment, ultimately relieves that pressure. As he writes, “We would all go down together.”
