album rating: ★★★★☆
Genre: Pop rock / jazz pop / soft rock / R&B. 52nd Street is the sixth studio album by Billy Joel (born William Martin Joel, The Bronx, New York, 1949), released on 11 October 1978 by Columbia Records — the follow-up to his breakthrough album The Stranger (1977) and the record that confirmed him as one of the defining voices of American popular music. The album's title is a double reference: to 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, historically one of the great centres of New York jazz from the Great Depression through the 1950s; and to the CBS Building on West 52nd Street, where Joel's label was headquartered at the time of release. The recording studio, A&R Recording, was also located on 52nd Street, one block from the label. This geography — the jazz heritage of the street, the commercial presence of the music industry — encapsulates the album's spirit: a deliberate move toward jazz sophistication, away from the more ballad-oriented The Stranger. Joel and his longtime producer Phil Ramone (their third consecutive album together, after Turnstiles in 1976 and The Stranger) enlisted jazz musicians to differentiate the sound. The nine-track album opens with three Top-40 singles: the assertive 'Big Shot', the ballad 'Honesty' and the funk-inflected 'My Life'. 'Zanzibar', with its horn charts and jazz-rock structure, and 'Rosalinda's Eyes', inspired by Joel's mother, are among the most ambitious album tracks. The freight elevator of A&R Recording appears on the album cover.
Label: Columbia Records (USA), released 11 October 1978.
Producer: Phil Ramone.
Recording studio: A&R Recording, 322 West 48th Street, New York City, USA.
Critical reception: 52nd Street received an immediate and warm critical response. Rolling Stone's Stephen Holden praised it as a 'remarkable catalogue of contemporary pop styles' blending rock, jazz and R&B. The AllMusic retrospective describes it as 'more sophisticated and somewhat jazzy' than The Stranger. It was voted number 352 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003. It earned two Grammy Awards at the 22nd Annual Grammy Awards in 1980: Album of the Year (presented to producer Phil Ramone; later passed to Joel after Ramone's death in 2013) and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.
Commercial success: 52nd Street was Joel's first album to reach number 1 on the Billboard 200, a position it held for eight non-consecutive weeks. It sold over seven million copies in the United States alone and was the number-one-selling album of the entire following year, 1979. Three singles reached the Top 40: 'My Life' (number 3), 'Big Shot' (number 14) and 'Honesty' (number 24). The album was among the first commercially released on the compact disc format — bearing catalogue number 35DP-1, it is frequently cited as the first CD released, reaching Japanese stores on 1 October 1982.
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