I didn’t know I needed the new Billy Joel documentary by Linda Holmes

I have occasionally confessed my longstanding fervent fandom for Billy Joel. Like Linda Holmes, I own a copy of Attila, the self-titled album by the heavy metal duo Joel was in right before launching his solo career with an LP that was recorded at wrong speed to make him sound like one of the Chipmunks. Because of this, I can relate to every bit of the piece Holmes wrote to coincide with the release of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the new two-part documentary on HBO Max. This article is published by NPR.

For the Back Street Kids by John Darnielle

As the wide swath of Billy Joel records on my shelf probably attests, I wasn’t one of Ozzy Osbourne’s disciples back when he was amassing multiplatinum sales back in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties. I still acknowledge and admire his exalted place in the history of hard rock, and I find it especially laudatory that his closing act on this mortal plane pulled in a staggering amount of money for charity. Pitchfork asked John Darnielle, frontman of the Mountain Goats and vocal heavy metal fan, to write a remembrance for Osbourne. It is a stellar piece, accurately and movingly capturing Osbourne’s mighty contribution to music.