- published: 02 Feb 2010
- views: 1051693
Glass Houses is the seventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, released on March 10, 1980. It features Joel's first song to peak at #1 on Billboard's Pop Singles chart, "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me." The album itself topped the Pop Albums chart for six weeks and was ranked number 4 on Billboard's 1980 year-end album chart. The album is the 41st best selling album of the 1980s, with sales of 7.1 million copies in the US alone. In 1981, Joel won a Grammy Award for "Best Male Rock Vocal Performance" for his work on Glass Houses. According to music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the album featured "a harder-edged sound" compared to Joel's other work, in response to the punk and new wave movements.
This album was the third collaboration between Joel and producer Phil Ramone, following The Stranger and 52nd Street.
Opening with the sound of glass shattering, Glass Houses has more of a hard rock feel than Joel's previous albums. The cover shows Joel poised to throw a rock through the two-story window of his real-life waterfront glass house in Oyster Bay. On some versions, the back cover shows Billy looking through the hole that the rock made in the glass. This alludes to the adage that "people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."
We take three steps forward and three steps back
She said 'I don't like the way you're dressed'
So then four words later she takes four back
She said 'I don't like the way you try your
Best to impress, you win.
Everything you do
Makes me wanna run'
Home will you get me going home?
Will you get me going home?
Give me what I want
Your glass half empty, glass half full
I'd say you've got some catching up to do
Your glass half empty, glass half full
I'd say you've got some catching up to do
Best to impress, you win
Everything you do
Makes me wanna run
Home, will you get me going home?
Will you get me going home?
Give me what I want
What is it you want me to know?