Storm Front by Billy Joel

Storm Front, Billy Joel's eleventh studio album, came out on Columbia in 1989, and the Piano Man handed the controls to a rocker: Mick Jones of Foreigner produced, on the recommendation of none other than Eddie Van Halen. The result is Joel with more muscle in the rhythm section. He has said that Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" gave him the driving beat he wanted for the title track, and the sleeve flies a maritime storm-warning flag for the strongest winds on the Beaufort scale.

The centerpiece is "We Didn't Start the Fire", a breathless, rapid-fire roll call of headlines, trends and famous faces running from 1949, the year Joel was born, up to 1989. Elsewhere there's "I Go to Extremes", about the swings of his own moods, plus "And So It Goes" and "The Downeaster 'Alexa'". It became his third album to top the US chart and drew five Grammy nominations.

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