Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - The Bridge: Piano Man, Everyman
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2020
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A special Hit Parade announcement: Like many media organizations at the moment, Slate is getting hit pretty hard by what's going on with the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to continue doing our work, providing you with all our great podcasts, news and reporting, and we simply cannot do that without your support. So we're asking you to sign up for Slate Plus, our membership program. It's just $35 for the first year, and it goes a long way to supporting us in this crucial moment.
As part of this effort, we're going to be making Hit Parade episodes available to Slate Plus members only., including the one previewed here. To listen to it in fuyou'll need to become a Slate Plus member. This is the best way to support our show and our work, and we hope you will pitch in if you can. Your membership will also give access to everything on Slate.com, you'll get ad-free versions of this and other shows, and you'll get bonus segments and bonus episodes of other Slate podcasts. Plus, once you become a member, you can sign up to do trivia with Chris Molanphy on Hit Parade—“The Bridge” episodes.
Please sign up today at slate.com/hitparadeplus. We thank you for your support.
In this Bridge episode of Hit Parade, host Chris Molanphy is joined by Julian Velard, musician and inspiration for Chris’s most recent full-length episode, about hitmaker Billy Joel. As a Jewish, New York–based piano player, Julian admits that Joel remains the most relevant touchpoint in his career to this day—and that he’s fought an existential battle with the song “Piano Man.” Chris and Julian wonder how a modern pop landscape might reward (or litigate) Joel’s tendency toward pastiche, and they discuss his ultimate legacy—to critics, to lovers, to haters and other piano men.
Next, Chris quizzes a Slate Plus listener with some music trivia, and the contestant turns the tables with a chance to try to stump Chris with a question of his own. Then, Chris teases the upcoming full-length episode of Hit Parade, which will look at the Southward journey of rap music in the late ’90s and early ’00s, spurred by chart-topping Atlanta rappers OutKast.
Podcast production by Asha Saluja.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.3 | Hey there, hit parade listeners. |
| 0:05.1 | What you're about to hear is a preview of our latest episode of The Bridge, and it's an |
| 0:11.7 | extra special, extra musical episode with my singer-songwriter guest, Julian Vallard. |
| 0:18.1 | As we announced last month, Slate, like many media outlets at the moment, |
| 0:22.8 | is getting hit pretty hard by what's going on with the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 |
| 0:28.6 | pandemic. We need your help to continue producing this show and all the other work we do |
| 0:35.3 | at Slate. So we're asking you to sign up for Slate Plus, our membership program. |
| 0:41.5 | It's just $35 for the first year, and it will go a long way toward supporting us at this crucial moment. |
| 0:49.0 | Sign up at slate.com slash hit parade plus, and you'll get to hear this and every episode of Hit Parade in full. |
| 0:58.5 | That's slate.com slash hit parade plus. Thanks. And now your episode preview. |
| 1:07.4 | I went searching for the truth, but to my innocence I found all the conmen and their acrobatts |
| 1:16.4 | who stopped me in the ground. |
| 1:19.0 | Hey everybody, this is Chris Malanthi, host of Hit Parade, Slate's podcast of Popchart History. |
| 1:25.6 | Welcome to The Bridge. |
| 1:30.9 | That's Getting Closer, |
| 1:39.0 | the final track on Billy Joel's 1986 album, The Bridge. The Hammond B3 organ was played by Steve Winward, which makes this song Extra 1986. The Bridge is widely regarded as Billy Joel's weakest |
| 1:46.7 | 1980s album, including by Joel himself, but it still went double platinum and generated |
| 1:54.0 | three top 40 hits. In retrospect, the bridge served as a bridge into the final phase of Billy Joel's career. |
| 2:02.9 | He recorded only two more studio albums of pop music before retiring from recording permanently. |
| 2:12.5 | And these mini episodes bridge are full-length monthly episodes, give us a chance to catch up with listeners, |
| 2:19.0 | and enjoy some Hit Parade trivia. This month, I'm thrilled to be joined by the man who helped |
... |
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