the inimitable mr joel

he's a grammy award winning member of the rock & roll hall of fame. clearly, i am not his only fan. and, yeah, i am not his biggest fan - not a groupie - don't have a room dedicated to pictures of him - don't scribble his name in the margins of my notebook.

so from his side, there are people who love him more, but from my side, he is the best. he is my favorite singer, favorite musician, favorite lyricist. i heard once that he wrote his music first, then his lyrics, and that's simply amazing to me because i am a poet but not a musician.

when i was in grade 7, i started a new school and had to carpool with strangers. one of the carpools was driven by a dad instead of a mom, which was odd, but his car had a cassette player and he had a few pop music cassettes. i knew absolutely nothing about pop music. less than nothing. i was completely ignorant of pop music but could have sung all 487926 verses of that freakin song about that guy that got on the mta and couldn't get off again. get off the damn train, charlie! sheesh.

at any rate, this dad had in his collection the stranger. the first time i heard it i was like... i don't know... like electrified, paralyzed, thrown into my own hemisphere. i could not believe someone had written songs so precisely for me.

this dad, whoever he was, must have sensed that i was [A] new to this school system and therefore knew no one and [2] was a complete & total geek and would never be friends with the likes of his daughter or the others in the carpool. this was the carpool of cool. except for me.

at any rate -- my point here is that he'd let me pick the music. it got to the point where he had to not let me pick anymore because i'd always pick the stranger and the other girls in the carpool were in danger of losing their eyeballs completely, the way they violently rolled their eyes at my choice. they knew every time what i was going to pick. they were sick of it. i couldn't get enough.

the next year i got my first record player -- a really simple stereo model for like $70 from zayre -- and i collected everything mr joel had published at the time. the stranger, piano man, turnstiles, streetlife serenader, then later i added 52nd street, cold spring harbor, nylon curtain, and glass houses before moving to cassettes for innocent man, the bridge, kohuept, storm front, river of dreams. those four later ones, i must admit, i didn't give a fair listen to. mini-me gave me songs in the attic last year - and it's an interesting mix of live recordings which she transferred from vinyl to cd which i ripped to the computer and moved from there to the ipod.

anyway - where the hell was i?

billy joel. greatest singer, musician, lyricist ever. yeah, i am not the only one who thinks he's great. but when i was a lonely 12-year-old who heard the stranger in a car full of strangers, i swore that no one would ever understand me better than a man i'd never meet.