Billy Joel’s appreciation of both pop music and love is reflected in this career-spanning collection of songs that channel rock’s gentler side while examining passion’s highs and lows. The sumptuous, sax-assisted “Just the Way You Are” and the wide-eyed piano ballad “She’s Got a Way” are straight-up devotionals, tailor-made for wedding dance floors. Joel has a complex, sometimes conflicted view of love, as evidenced by the doo-wop throwback “An Innocent Man” and the world-weary “Honesty”; that candor adds a frisson of heat to this collection.
- Daryl Hall & John Oates
- Jackson Browne
- Barry Manilow