Abstract
While addressing American politics and social change, Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain (1982) exhibits a confluence of musical and recording techniques that convey the themes at the core of the song cycle: disappointment, frustration, and resignation. An examination of several tracks with regard to instrumentation, non-musical sounds, vocal timbre, and panning reveals how these techniques, though used occasionally on Joel’s earlier records, align here to support the album’s larger social commentary. While these techniques appear on subsequent albums, never again in Joel’s career do they reach the concentration achieved in this work.
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