Maps of Music

Glass Houses (1980)

Where the lyrics of Glass Houses take you, and where it was really made.

The cover shows Billy Joel about to throw a rock through a window of his real-life waterfront glass house in Cove Neck.

Key places

Cover photo location in Cove Neck (1980)

Album cover Cove Neck — The cover shows Joel about to throw a rock through a window of his real-life waterfront glass house in Cove Neck. The point marks the village, not the exact house. Google Maps · Apple Maps

How to get there: See the map for directions.

Album story

Overview

• Glass Houses: seventh studio album by Billy Joel
• Released March 12, 1980 by Columbia Records
• Commercial success; topped the Billboard 200 for six consecutive weeks
• Features Joel's first single to peak at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100: 'It's Still Rock and Roll to Me'
• Ranked No. 4 on Billboard's 1980 year-end chart
• 41st best-selling album of the 1980s, with 7.1 million copies sold in the US alone
• Won the 1981 Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance

Background

• Third collaboration between Joel and producer Phil Ramone, after The Stranger and 52nd Street
• Final collaboration between Joel and Ramone in association with Home Run
• Opens with the sound of glass shattering; has a harder rock feel than Joel's previous albums
• Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine describes a harder-edged sound, in response to the punk and new wave movements
• Final studio album with the original Billy Joel Band: Joel, Richie Cannata, Doug Stegmeyer, Russell Javors, Liberty DeVitto
• New lead guitarist David Brown augmented the lineup
• Cannata left the band just before the sessions for Joel's next album, 1982's The Nylon Curtain

Recording

• Produced by Phil Ramone; engineered by Jim Boyer; assistant engineer Bradshaw Leigh
• Mastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound in New York

Cover

• Joel poised to throw a rock through the two-story window of his real-life waterfront glass house in Cove Neck
• On some versions, the back cover shows Joel looking through the hole the rock made in the glass

Sources: en.wikipedia.org

Tracklist

Sources: musicbrainz.org

Artist

Early life

• Born May 9, 1949 in the Bronx, New York City; raised in Hicksville on Long Island.
• Began piano lessons at age four at his mother's insistence.
• Saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and decided to pursue a music career.
• Played in the Echoes, the Hassles, and Attila before going solo.

Career

• Debut solo album Cold Spring Harbor (1971); signed with Columbia Records in 1972 after a Philadelphia radio broadcast of "Captain Jack".
• Breakthrough with The Stranger (1977), Columbia's best-selling release at that time.
• 52nd Street (1978) won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
• Released 12 self-written studio albums from 1971 to 1993; over 160 million records sold worldwide.
• Performed a long Madison Square Garden residency from 2014 to 2024.
• Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org

Reception

At release

• Rolling Stone critic Paul Nelson: 'Billy Joel writes smooth and cunning melodies, and what many of his defenders say is true: his material's catchy.'
• Robert Christgau, in Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s (1990), reviewed the album in the same guide

Reappraisal

• Chuck Klosterman praised the album in a 2004 essay on Joel from his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
• Klosterman singled out lesser-known tracks such as 'All for Leyna', 'I Don't Want to Be Alone', 'Sleeping with the Television On' and 'Close to the Borderline'
• AllMusic retrospective review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine: 'but Glass Houses is the closest Joel ever got to a pure rock album.'

Records

• Topped the Billboard 200 for six consecutive weeks
• 41st best-selling album of the 1980s
• 7.1 million copies sold in the US alone
• Ranked No. 4 on Billboard's 1980 year-end chart
• 1981 Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance

Sources: en.wikipedia.org

Trivia

• The album is titled after the glass house in which Joel lived; the cover shows him about to throw a rock through its window.
• Klosterman's essay title refers to a line from the album's song 'Don't Ask Me Why'.
• Some versions of the back cover show the hole the rock made in the glass, with Joel looking through it.
• The album's opening sound is glass shattering.
• The final album with the original Billy Joel Band lineup before Richie Cannata left.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org

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