The Nylon Curtain

Billy Joel's chameleonlike leaps from style to style have never resulted in a more audacious album than 1982's Nylon Curtain. Gloriously overreaching both musically--Joel seems compelled to act as both Lennon and McCartney on this heavily Beatles-influenced disc--and thematically, he takes on everything from romance in an age of alienation ("Laura," "A Room of Our Own") to the sociopolitical causes of that alienation ("Goodnight Saigon," the moving recession saga "Allentown"). And it all works. As a portrait of a pop artist getting the Big Ideas out of his system, The Nylon Curtain is hard to beat.