The Stranger might just be Billy Joel’s most successful album, both critically and commercially. It won him a Grammy, and many of the songs you know him best for came off that album — “Movin’ Out,” “Just The Way You Are,” “The Stranger,” “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “Only The Good Die Young,” “She’s Always a Woman” amongst them. “Vienna” has become a favorite in concert in recent years, too.

Phil Ramone has remastered the album and there are two editions available of it now for pre-order. The first is a two CD set. The first disc is the remastered album. The second is a Carnegie Hall concert recording from just before the release of the CD.

The second release is a deluxe edition that comes with both of those CDs, another CD recording of a concert from that time, a DVD of BBC’s “Old Grey Whistle” recording from the time (I think I have an audio bootleg of this somewhere), and a 48 page booklet featuring pics from a photo shot from the album and liner notes from a Rolling Stone Magazine editor. That “Old Grey Whistle” video includes favorites like “Ain’t No Crime” and “Root Beer Rag,” which is an incredible little piano ditty that you’ve likely never seen before.

It’s $40 for the latter, $17 for the former at Amazon for pre-order today.

Billy Joel will be appearing on Oprah Monday for the first time to promote it.

I am very excited. This is a great case of an edition you don’t want to just download off Amazon or iTunes.

Rolling Stone : Paul McCartney Divorce Settlement: $48.7 Million

The divorce saga between Paul McCartney and his estranged wife Heather Mills has finally come to an end, with Mills receiving £24.3 million, or $48.7 million.

Last week, the pundits disagreed with me. They dared to say my prediction that the Beatles catalog would wind up on IDOL that night was bunk. They said I didn’t know what I was talking about. Everyone knew, after all, that it couldn’t and wouldn’t happen until after McCartney’s divorce was finalized.

The divorce is now a done deal. And IDOL is doing a second Beatles week this week. The timing couldn’t possibly be better, aside from Yoko Ono casting a spell to bring Lennon back from the dead to perform a duet with David Archuleta.
I thus renew my prediction — the Beatles are coming to iTunes tonight. You’ll see the announcement in an ad during the first half of the show. Bring it on!

And if it doesn’t happen tonight, then it’ll happen on the results show tomorrow night. If it doesn’t happen then, I’ll come up with a new excuse. . . Eventually, you know I’ll be right!

(Let us all just hope that rumors of Mariah Carey acting as a guest judge tonight are horribly horribly wrong.  I know she has a new album out to pimp and all, but — Mariah judging Beatles covers?  No.)

Rolling Stone : Smoking Section: Jakob Dylan, Pharrell Williams, Eddie Vedder

While his Wallflowers have been on hiatus, Dylan spent 2007 visiting Rick Rubin’s studio, where he laid down minimalist acoustic tracks that deal with the darkness of these times — “Evil Is Alive and Well” and “All Day and All Night” — and more contented tunes like “Something Good This Way Comes.”

While I wasn’t a huge fan of their last album, I generally like The Wallflowers.  They’ve mixed up their sound a bit with each album, produce memorable tracks, and do solid work.  Sadly, I think everyone thinks of them as “one hit wonders” after “One Headlight” and moved on.  Frustrating.

I hope this upcoming solo album for Dylan works out, and will be downloadable at Amazon.com, where I’ve redeemed enough Pepsi bottle caps to earn almost a complete free album. =)

As I write this, we’re only 2.5 hours away from an announcement of the Beatles on iTunes. I’m guessing it’ll be announced on a commercial at the first break. Come to think of it, tonight’s show was already taped. So I bet Seacrest didn’t make the announcement. (That would have leaked by now, unless they laid it in afterwards.)

It has to be a commercial.

Update: It’s 9:32 and we have no Beatles on iTunes yet.  I’m beginning to think it’ll be announced during the results show tomorrow.  That’s live, so there’s no need to keep things a secret during the taping of the performances.

Yeah, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Failing that — yeah, the Beatles songs ARE on the iTunes store.  They’re just sung by the IDOL contestants. . .

Today, Apple signed the deal with Paul McCartney (rumored to be at about $400 million) to carry the complete Beatles catalogue on iTunes.  (I presume it’s an exclusive.)

Tomorrow, American Idol’s Top 12 perform Beatles songs.

Apple is a major sponsor of American Idol.

Apple traditionally releases new products on Tuesdays.

As I predicted a couple of weeks ago, the math on this is too good NOT to be true.

So how will it work?  Will Apple announce the Beatles on iTunes tomorrow morning?  Will they wait until Tuesday night and have Ryan Seacrest announce it?  Would Steve Jobs appear on Idol via satellite to help pad out a two hour show that only needs to be 90 minutes?  Or will Apple stay quiet and product a single 30 second commercial during Idol to make it official?  (Picture a Beatles song playing for 30 seconds with a montage of pics of the Beatles from their prime, followed by a card, “Only on iTunes” followed by the Apple logo.  And cut.)

Make your predictions now!

Here’s a complete history of the Leonard Cohen song, “Hellelujah.” It comes complete with sound clips tracking the progression of the song and its popularity as a cover ditty, right up to and including the recent cover of it by The Fall Out Boys that sounds pretty heinous.

It was announced today that AMERICAN IDOL acquired the rights to the Lennon/McCartney songbook for the first time in its seven seasons. And what does that mean? BEATLES WEEK!

IDOL has said that they’re focusing on the contestants more this season and only planning on four guest mentors. Surely, scoring McCartney or Ringo would be a huge “get” and one worth doing.

Now, hold onto your hats:

Apple is a major sponsor of IDOL this year. Besides selling all the audio and videos of the show performances on iTunes, they’re also advertising their computers and iPods during the show.

Wouldn’t “Beatles Week” be the perfect time to release the Beatles catalogue to iTunes, with an original Beatle appearing on the show and everything?

It’s corporate synergy. It’s the biggest TV show of the week. It’s masterful marketing and promotion. You don’t need Steve Jobs to make the announcements to a few hundred journalists when you have Ryan Seacrest telling tens of millions of people, after weeks of advertising the iPod Touch on the show.

Discuss.

• I really need to do another Twitter post, don’t I? I haven’t posted much over there lately. Need to get back into the groove.

• Screen shot comparisons between the Apple TV, Blu Ray, Cable HD, DVD, and SD Cable video. Apple TV holds up pretty well. You can’t beat Blu Ray discs, though. Not yet, anyway.

• The new STAR TREK film has been delayed to Summer 2009 now.

• The new INDIANA JONES movie trailer is available for viewing.

• Super Mario Bros. a capella.  With Zelda and Mortal Kombat, et. al. included. Hilarious!

• Much more about Auto Tune Abuse.

• Geek alert for the day: BeOS is coming BeACK?!?

I didn’t intend to watch The Grammys, but then I had an hour to kill, so I thought I’d rip through the three and a half hours on the DVR in that hour.

Not bad. I really expected worse. On the other hand, I probably skipped over all the annoying stuff. Still:

• I can almost take Fergie as a torch song singer, until I start humming “My Humps” under my breath as I watch her sing.

• Lots of good piano music present in there. “Rhapsody In Blue” with two pianos was really cool. John Legend can tickle the ivories. Alicia Keys never sits still long enough behind the piano, and has a completely new look and new hair every time she shows up in the show. And the kid who played under the Grammys’ Back Patting Manifesto was pretty cool, too.

• Tina Turner - I’m conflicted. Part of me thinks it’s cool that she’s still going. Part of me thinks she’s well preserved in Botox and is just barely getting through those moves. She’s still doing 110% better than anyone her age has a right to, though. (Quick, check her for steroids!) But I’m old-fashioned enough to remember when she was a diva in the 80s, so I can appreciate that.

• Beyonce lip-synched well to that opening bit, too.

• There’s no need to stop the show for Audience Interaction. The My Grammy Moment thing took twice as much time as it needed to.

• That was probably just to buy time to set up the next set of pyrotechnics I have an idea — why not just get people who can sing and play instruments on stage? Skip the overblown orchestral and choir backups. Get rid of the extraneous dancers. Get rid of the special effects. Let’s just get to the music.

• Carrie Underwood did a great job. It’s like watching a little kid grow up before our eyes, isn’t it, Idol fans? The outfit was hideous, but I liked the song and the Stomp/Blue Woman Group background clangers.

• Opening with a duet with a dead guy isn’t cool anymore. It got annoying about 20 seconds into “Unforgettable” about 15 years ago, and hasn’t gotten any better with age. Nice CGI, now let’s move on.

• Yes, I’m old. I don’t know half the people on that stage. And I’m OK with that. I’m over 30. My musical tastes are set in stone now. The Grammys are for someone else. I don’t think I own a single record from anyone who performed on the show.

• I liked the Beatles bit. Ringo was cute in his acceptance speech, too.

• OK, seeing The Time reunite was pretty awesome. Bizarre, Kevin Smith style odd, but awesome.

• The show was scheduled for 3.5 hours and still couldn’t finish on time. Ridiculous.

What else went on? What did you like and/or hate?

Sony BMG Plans to Drop DRM

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

It’ll only be through the Amazon store. I love Amazon’s MP3 store. Don’t get me wrong. But to try to screw Apple by denying them DRM-free music when they started this whole thing is just like leaving bags of money on the side of the road. As great as Amazon’s system is, there are lots of people who won’t look past iTunes. Sony is deciding to put its own stupid corporate ego ahead of sound business practice here. They could sell twice as many DRM-free tracks if they let Apple sell them, too.

And I have to wonder if all those people who wanted to sue Apple for being a music monopoly will now sue the companies that sell DRM-free music on Amazon, but not iTunes.

Yeah, I didn’t think so, either.

Overlooked last week:

Will he outsell Jordin Sparks? I believe we’ll find out in the next couple of days.

And Jessica Sierra’s downward spiral continues. . .

Get them here.

I own, I think, one album that got any nominations in this list.  (It’s Maroon V’s album, which I really did like a lot.)
Thus, I do not really care about the Grammys, save for the car wreck potential of the telecast.

Rolling Stone : “High School Musical 2″ Soundtrack Sets Record For Worst Best-Seller Ever

The amount of albums HSM2 sold: 2.3 million copies. That figure means the album is poised to walk away with a more dubious honor: the record for lowest number of copies sold by the year’s best-selling album since SoundScan started keeping track of these stats in 1991. The previous Worst-Best mark was 2006’s High School Musical soundtrack, which sold 3.7 million copies, more than a million more than its sequel.

As the article further points out, Shania Twain’s record about a decade ago sold 15 million copies. Remember when The Backstreet Boys would release an album to 1,000,000 sales on its first day?

There’s no bigger phenom amongst the kiddies right now than HSM. If that thing can’t sell better than 4 million copies, there’s trouble brewing.

It’s a CD selling for less than EIGHT BUCKS and they still can’t sell it.  Amazing.

• Wii Guitar Hero 3 only in mono? Noooooo!!! Wait, can you really tell the difference? Hopefully, they’ll have it fixed before Christmas. . .
• Guitar Hero driving album sales. Who’da thunk it?
• The Most Photographed Barn in America. Indeed.
• Funny wedding photos.
• Details emerge on the Plug-In Prius.
• Great. I forget to record “The Next Great American Band” last week and it’s a Billy Joel week. This is what Bit Torrent Hulu iTunes SOMETHING is for. . .  Hollywood sure doesn’t make it easy to Do The Right Thing.
• Marc Andreeson makes a strong pitch for the Hollywood Model changing to the Silicon Valley model of doing business. It would, amongst other things, eliminate the need for a Writer’s Guild.
• Orphaned owls find new pal — a plush owl. All Too Cute picture included at the link.
• Weezer officially announces their sixth album. It’s coming in the spring.

This should prove a better fit than a dance album, at least

Exclusive: Jewel Goes Country With New Label

Singer/songwriter Jewel has a new label and a new genre to boot. The artist has signed a multi-album deal with newly launched Nashville-based independent Valory Music Company and will pursue success on the country charts.