For an album called “Piano Man” by an artist famed for his piano playing, it starts off strangely enough–Travelin’ Prayer starts off with a fast piano figure, but it’s soon drowned out by banjo, bluegrass percussion, juice harp, and other Appalachian standbys. Joel belts out a frantic country western tune, pausing once in the chaos for a well executed–but brief–piano solo. It’s an interesting choice for an album that most every listener would buy on the merit of its legendary title track, and arguably, not a good one.

In fact, the first several bars of Piano Man are sadly obscured by this WTF moment that opens the album. But once the bluegrass fog fades away, the lead single is just as timeless and wonderful as you always remember. And when he belts out “the piano sounds like a carnival”–the picture he paints is just as potent and superbly crafted as it was the first time you heard it.

But, the greatness of the title track easily overshadows anything that follows it, leaving us with some impressive, although stale, honky-tonk playing, but not too much memorable. The Ballad of Billy the Kid is epic in scope, mostly thanks to the hired orchestra rather than the film-scene-conjuring songwriting of Piano Man. There are some catchy moments and some well-played piano solos, but the songs themselves more often than not leave much to be desired. It’s comparable to tech metal, in that it may be difficult to play, but that doesn’t make it good to listen to, and it often relies on technical prowess to make up for a lack of innovation (see: the completely forgettable You’re My Home). Captain Jack, though not as singable as Piano Man, tells a story with the same evocative lyricism of the single–though more mature in subject matter (“Captain Jack will get you high tonight”;“Your sister’s gone out, she’s on a date/You just stay at home and masturbate”) and, as a result, nowhere near its stature.

The greatness of Piano Man, the song, is the greatest flaw of Piano Man, the album. It’s just a fantastically written song that completely overshadows even the most ambitious efforts on the record. But all in all, not even orchestral production or seven minute long gritty-city songs can save Piano Man the album from Piano Man the song’s shadow. But whereas with Billy Idol the singles/album dichotomy was a tragedy, that was because the rest of the album was actually good. Here, the tension between potential and actual is so great that even the best non-single tracks shrivel in the light of the title track’s fame and quality.