Code of Silence

This album has been added to 1 public list:

• 

  Seven Songs for the Week #132 - 15th Oct 25

  Jason Carty

  Driving in the Irish countryside this past weekend and I decided to listen to The Bridge, from start to finish, for some reason. I bought this record when it came out - I was a huge Billy fan as a kid - and it was my first CD. Anyways, its a very uneven listen which now has a lot of the sounds of 1986 on it, one song even name-checks 1986, which is never a good idea. The opening track, Running On Ice, sounds like Billy is trying to sing like Sting, on A Matter of Trust he's channeling Springsteen (this was Billy's first album post Born In The USA-mania). Unusually, the album gets better as it goes on, the best stuff is on the b-side. Big Man on Mulberry Street is like no other Billy track, and inspired a whole episode of Moonlighting, which is very mid-1980s. Stevie Winwood Hammonds it up on the closing track. Here Cyndi Lauper joins in is a song about nothing, what's the code of silence, what do they want to say? It's a mystery. I like the brief World In Action/Mountain interlude. BTW Cyndi Lauper is to Billy Joel what Stevie Nicks is to Tom Petty.