Billy Joel's chameleonlike leaps from style to style have never resulted in a more audacious album than 1982's Nylon Curtain. Gloriously overreaching both musically--Joel seems compelled to act as both Lennon and McCartney on this heavily Beatles-influenced disc--and thematically, he takes on everything from romance in an age of alienation (Laura, A Room of Our Own) to the sociopolitical causes of that alienation (Goodnight Saigon, the moving recession saga Allentown). And it all works. As a portrait of a pop artist getting the Big Ideas out of his system, The Nylon Curtain is hard to beat.