There’s a particular period of my life that I have always referred to as my Year of Hell. (The phrase is borrowed from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager; call it my annus horribilis if you prefer a more classical term.) In fact, I cheat a little bit: it’s a period of just about thirteen months, spanning from September of 2001 through September of the following year. Perhaps it’s overstating things a bit; I know I’ve had a pretty good life, and I probably don’t know what true suffering is like. But it was, as they say, a rough patch.

That thirteen-month period started, of course, with an event that wasn’t about me at all: 9/11, a trauma we all shared, even those of us who watched only from a distance. I felt shaken: it seemed that the world had changed, and not for the better. Over the weeks and months that followed, I watched nervously as the economy reeled and the country moved toward war. But gradually I began to realize that despite the enormity of the event, my own life hadn’t really been affected.

I have strong opinions about Billy Joel’s music, so of course I had to take this opportunity to analyze it and determine his best and worst albums! I was going to do the top five songs and bottom five songs, but all the bottom ones would have come from the same album, so that doesn’t seem interesting. Then I was going to write about just the singles, but that would have taken more time than I had to weed through. So, I opted to go with the top and bottom albums instead. I’m going to tell you the top and bottom albums critically speaking, what I think are his best and worst albums, and then what my favorite and least favorite albums are. For the critical rankings, the criteria I am going to use are, first, peak chart position in the United States, followed (for the best album) by the number of countries in which the album was No. 1, since there are four albums that went to No. 1 in the U.S.

Here we go!