This edition of COLD SPRING HARBOR is an Enhanced CD containing both a full audio program as well as a video clip for the song "Everybody Loves You Now."

Personnel: Billy Joel (vocals); Larry Carlton, Don Evans, "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow, Sal De Troia (guitar); Al Campbell, L.D. Dixon (piano, keyboards, synthesizers); Rhys Clark, Mike McGee, Danny Siewell (drums, percussion).

Recorded at Record Plant West, Los Angeles, California & at Ultrasonic Studios, Hempstead, New York.

Digitally remastered by Ted Jensen (Sterling Sound, New York, New York).

This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.

Billy Joel's melodic gifts were very much in evidence on his first album, more so because the rest of his talents still had some catching up to do. COLD SPRING HARBOR contains the lovely devotional ballad "She's Got a Way," which became a hit when a live version was released more than a decade later (on SONGS IN THE ATTIC). It also features a couple of frenetically catchy melodies in "Everybody Loves You Now" and "Falling of the Rain" (whose arpeggiated piano playing would become a Joel trademark).

The words often seem like afterthoughts--something to sing the melodies with--but there sure are a lot of them. "Everybody Loves You Now," about the isolation of fame (did he know something even then?), has more verses than you'd think anyone could fit into two and a half minutes. The original album was mistakenly sped up in the mastering process and was long a source of embarrassment to Joel. It quickly went out of print and remained so until Columbia released a corrected version in 1984, finally giving fans the chance to hear where it all began.