Billy Joel - Streetlife Serenade 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (2025)

Here’s a belated 50th anniversary present for Billy Joel fans: a new, Japan-exclusive collector’s edition of his third studio album, 1974’s Streetlife Serenade.

Available February 19, this lavish deluxe version – which follows a similar package for its predecessor Piano Man last year – includes many similar extras. The 7″ cardboard packaging includes lyrics and liner notes in English and Japanese (including a CD-sized replica of the original booklet that came with the Japanese LP), replicas of four international 45 RPM single picture sleeves (Portuguese, German, Dutch and Japanese), two obi strips (including a re-creation of the original vinyl’s) and a shrunken re-creation of the album’s original press kit (also in English and Japanese). On the first of two discs, a hybrid SACD, listeners can enjoy not only the remastered original album (DSD-mastered from the analog 2-channel mix master source on the SACD layer and converted to PCM on the CD layer) but the long-unavailable quadrophonic mix of the LP, newly DSD-mastered at Sony Music Studios in Japan. (Appropriately, this disc’s face features Columbia’s familiar in-house label in gold, as quadrophonic LPs would have at the time.) The set’s second disc, a Blu-Spec CD2, will offer the first physical CD release of Live At The Great American Music Hall, 1975, a live set first released in 2021 as part of Legacy Recordings’ first volume of Billy Joel albums re-pressed on vinyl. (It was later released individually for Record Store Day, also getting a digital release, and portions were released on both the Japanese Piano Man expansion and a physical edition of the digital collection Live Through the Years also released in that country.)

Streetlife Serenade may be one of the more unusual – and perhaps overlooked – albums in Joel’s celebrated catalogue. His third album (and second for longtime home base Columbia Records), it followed the modest breakthrough of 1973’s Piano Man with a similar formula to its predecessor. Working again with producer Michael Stewart and a team of Los Angeles session musicians, Joel later admitted the difficulty of recording a follow-up album with an admittedly thinner notebook of songs, so occupied had he been touring in support of Piano Man – at one point opening for The Beach Boys. Consequently, the album boasts not one but two instrumentals: the dexterous “Root Beer Rag” and the offbeat closer “The Mexican Connection.” The remaining songs furthered Joel’s tenuous connection with the West Coast (having retreated to L.A. after the failure of debut Cold Spring Harbor in 1971), with album cuts like “The Great Suburban Showdown” and “The Last of the Big Time Spenders” sounding like the kind of piano fare he’d run through at a bar gig. The melodramatic “Weekend Song” and “Los Angelenos” and fared better, as did the semi-grandiose title track; the latter two were resurrected for Joel’s 1981 live album Songs in the Attic, offering the cream of his songbook before The Stranger became a blockbuster in 1977. Best of all might be “The Entertainer,” a jaunty, meta pop tune – anchored by a then-rare Moog synth performance from Joel – about trying to make it as a musician and just nosing over the line of success. It became his second Top 40 hit after “Piano Man.”

Live At the Great American Music Hall, 1975 offers a glimpse at Joel’s increasing surety as a live performer in the wake of Streetlife Serenade. With half the album accounted for in the set list, Billy puts on a fine set with a backing band that included guitarist Don Evans (one of the players on Streetlife Serenade), drummer Rhys Clark (who’d drummed on Piano Man standout “Captain Jack”), second keyboardist/horn player Johnny Almond, and – most notably – bassist Doug Stegmeyer, who’d be retained by Joel for the self-produced sessions to 1976’s Turnstiles and, like many of the players on that album, would become his locked-in studio and live band for the next decade. The set list is particularly notable for three separate moments where Joel imitates other popular, often piano-driven rockers of the day (singing Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful,” future tour-mate Elton John’s “Bennie & The Jets” and Leon Russell’s “Delta Lady”), as well as two as-yet unrecorded tunes that would make the cut for Turnstiles: the contemplative “James” and a looser yet still-destined-to-be-a-standard read of “New York State of Mind.” This album closed a noteworthy chapter of Joel’s career chronicle in 2021, being the last album era of Joel’s that had never been complemented by an official contemporary or archival release of any live performance.