52nd Street by Billy Joel

52nd Street was Billy Joel's sixth album, the Columbia follow-up to his breakthrough The Stranger, and instead of photocopying a hit he hired a pack of jazz players to rough up the sound. Phil Ramone produced it at A&R Recording, which sat on 52nd Street itself, the Midtown strip where jazzmen held court from the Depression on; that's the studio's freight elevator on the cover, and the label's own offices were on the same street.

The result swings harder and smokier than anything he'd done before, piano-man pop with jazz in its veins, and "My Life", "Big Shot" and "Honesty" all made the Top 40. It was Joel's first album to top the Billboard 200 and took Album of the Year at the Grammys, a trophy that went to Ramone and passed to Joel after Ramone's death. One more footnote: when CDs reached Japanese shops on October 1, 1982, it carried catalogue number 35DP-1, which is why it's so often called the first compact disc ever released.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.