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On the surface, there may appear to be little in common between Sgt. Pepper, a fanciful performance by a fictitious band, and The Nylon Curtain, perhaps Joel’s most ambitious collection of pop/rock songs. Yet there are parallels, the first of which is the narrative of escape. This can be found first in the use of the facade, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which famously resulted from the Beatles’ desire to distance themselves from their own fame and the expectations that arose from it. “We were getting a little bit fed up of being the Beatles,” McCartney wrote, “because everything we did had to be the Beatles, and I felt we were getting trapped in this whole idea of ‘what kind of songs does John do? What does George [Harrison] do? Paul does the ballads.’ It was all getting so bloody predictable.”¹¹

On Sgt. Pepper, a narrative of escape is perhaps clearest in McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home” (although it can be found in other songs as well). As the lyrics convey, parents wake to find their daughter gone, having run away from home with “a man from the motor trade.” They do not understand their child’s desire to flee since, from their perspective, they had provided everything she needed. They sing, “we gave her everything money could buy,” as an arpeggiated harp sounds behind the string accompaniment. The unnamed daughter is unsettled too, as the goodbye note she leaves behind feels incomplete, like the final bar of the song’s chorus, which features a sudden shift from long legato notes to stabs of staccato, such that the start of the next verse seems to arrive a beat early. Ultimately, when the girl steps out of the house, where, despite cohabitating with her parents, she had been “living alone for so many years,” she is finally “free”—from her parents, her past, and, according to Everett, the frustration arising from the growing “generation gap” between youth of the 1960s and their elders.¹² Indeed, the lyric, “free,” falls on the downbeat of the last measure of dominant harmony before resolving to tonic at the start of the song’s chorus.

From the outset, Joel’s album similarly embraces a narrative of escape. “Allentown,” the lead track, bemoans the shuttering of factories and the outsourcing of American heavy industry in the 1970s. “It’s getting very hard to stay,” Joel sings, encapsulating a contradictory desire to both leave one’s dying hometown but also to stay and persevere because, after all, it is still home even if it feels different. Similarly, the song’s verses are constructed of a sequence of ii–V–I harmonic progressions, tonicizing the keys of D, G, and C. As each one ends, the start of the next, leading to a new tonal area, suggests that the cadential resolution provided mere beats earlier was somehow incomplete or insufficient. Joel even references the generation gap to which Everett refers, recalling that their fathers served in World War II and met the women (who would become mothers) at USO events.

Throughout the rest of the album, Joel subtly and directly cites the punishing forces from which Americans sought escape, from toxic personal relationships (in “Laura”) to the horror and aftermath of the Vietnam War (in “Goodnight Saigon”). Other themes more clearly parallel the Beatles, including redemption, which can be heard in the Beatles’ “Getting Better” and Joel’s “She’s Right on Time,” and the maturity of aging, in the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” and Joel’s “A Room of Our Own.”

Both albums exude theatricality. The Nylon Curtain ends with “Where’s the Orchestra?,” in which Joel sings as a protagonist who takes in a night of theater yet is confused to find a play rather than a musical. He uses several techniques to suggest a theater setting, including timbral effects, stereo panning, and instrumentation—specifically a string quartet, clarinet, and harmonica, but not a rock band.¹³ For the Beatles, the theater setting is a central pillar on which rests the whole premise of the Sgt. Pepper album, reinforced by crowd noise and applause on multiple tracks. And Sgt. Pepper, too, expanded the instrumental forces put to use on a rock album, for example in the use of strings on “She’s Leaving Home” (following their pioneering use on Revolver’s “Eleanor Rigby” [1966]).

Both Sgt. Pepper and The Nylon Curtain are concept albums.¹⁴ Joel considers Sgt. Pepper to be “the ultimate concept album” and explains that his goal with The Nylon Curtain was to write a concept album too: “I suppose I wanted to create my masterpiece.”¹⁵ Reflecting on Sgt. Pepper, Beatles producer George Martin described McCartney as more interested in composing as if “writing your novel” rather than discrete songs.¹⁶ The performance by Sgt. Pepper’s band is a connecting thread, tying the album’s opening and penultimate tracks using a reprise.¹⁷ Joel in fact credits the Beatles with some of what he calls “musical trailblazing” in this regard. The Beatles’ “real accomplishment was what they did with the L.P.,” he told Schruers. “By the time I was trying to catch up with them, they’d taken that three-minute-length limit for songs and moved it to a more conceptual level. . . . When I was writing music, there was that opportunity—sometimes it felt like a burden—to have a coherent feel and message across nine or ten cuts . . . that was the discipline.”¹⁸ Thus, for Joel, Sgt. Pepper served as a model concept album, resulting from the technological innovation of the long-playing record, that could be emulated in form to weave both musical (“feel”) and lyrical (“message”) themes together across multiple songs to create a more substantial work.

On The Nylon Curtain, the concept is announced in the opening number: “Allentown” makes it clear that this is going to be an album about disillusionment with, and the disintegration of, the American dream. The rest of the songs follow suit in their own ways. For example, “Pressure” deals with the social pressures of modern life; “A Room of Our Own” attempts to come to grips with new ways men and women relate to each other, together but separately; and “Surprises” reminds us that the mistakes of the past inevitably return to haunt us. Then, the closing number (“Where’s the Orchestra?”) offers not only the confusion and resignation of the previous eight songs recast as the personal experience of a disoriented theatergoer, but also a reprise. During the song’s outro and fadeout, the clarinet and harmonica take up the opening melody from “Allentown,” bringing listeners full circle. Thus, both albums take us on a journey, and for both it is a round-trip ticket. Just as the audience finds itself, at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s performance, in the same place as when it began, by the end of The Nylon Curtain, listeners find themselves, sadly, no better off than they were at its beginning.