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About Billy Joel

William Martin Joel was born May 9, 1949, in the Bronx and raised in Hicksville on Long Island in a Levittown-adjacent tract house where his German-Jewish refugee father, Howard Joel, was a classically trained pianist who left the family in 1957. The piano lessons started at four — formal, classical, the kind of training that gave him the technical chops that still distinguish him from the singer-songwriter-at-the-piano peer set even now. He boxed Golden Gloves in his teens, played in the local Long Island bar bands the Lost Souls and the Hassles through the mid-sixties, and recorded a heavy psych-metal duo called Attila with drummer Jon Small in 1970 that the AllMusic database has historically described as one of the worst records ever made. The pivot came when he moved to Los Angeles in 1972 after a fraught contract with Family Productions left his first solo record — Cold Spring Harbor — mastered at the wrong speed and effectively unsellable. He took a job at a piano bar on Wilshire under the stage name Bill Martin, played six nights a week for six months, and wrote the song that would name him for the rest of his career: Piano Man, a 4/4 ballad in waltz time about the regulars at the bar — the real-estate novelist, the businessmen, the waitress practising politics — that closed his second album in 1973 and went on to become the most-streamed Billy Joel track of all time. The Stranger arrived in 1977 produced by Phil Ramone — Just the Way You Are, Movin' Out (Anthony's Song), Only the Good Die Young, She's Always a Woman — sold over ten million copies in the United States and won two Grammys including Record of the Year for Just the Way You Are. 52nd Street followed in 1978 — My Life, Big Shot, Honesty, Zanzibar — and won the Album of the Year Grammy at the 1980 ceremony. Glass Houses in 1980 — You May Be Right, It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Don't Ask Me Why, Sometimes a Fantasy — was a deliberate harder-edged pivot in response to the punk and new-wave criticism that he had become too soft, and It's Still Rock and Roll to Me became his first US number-one single. The Nylon Curtain in 1982 was the deliberately Beatles-influenced concept-album turn — Allentown, Pressure, Goodnight Saigon. An Innocent Man in 1983 was the doo-wop and Motown homage to the music he grew up on — Tell Her About It, Uptown Girl (written for Christie Brinkley, whom he would marry in 1985), The Longest Time, Keeping the Faith — and produced five top-ten singles. Storm Front in 1989 delivered We Didn't Start the Fire, the rapid-fire historical-headlines list-song that hit number one, plus Leningrad and I Go to Extremes. River of Dreams in 1993 — the title track, Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel), All About Soul — was his last pop-rock studio album. He pivoted to classical composition (the Fantasies & Delusions piano suite, 2001), occasional one-off singles (All My Life in 2007, Christmas in Fallujah, Turn the Lights Back On in 2024), and a touring career that became the primary creative output. The Madison Square Garden monthly residency launched in January 2014 with the artist agreeing to one Garden show a month for as long as the building could fill the room — a programme structure with no real precedent in arena touring. The pattern held for a hundred and fifty consecutive sold-out shows before the residency concluded in July 2024 as the longest and largest single-artist residency in the venue's history. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1992), received the Kennedy Center Honors (2013), and was awarded the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (2014). He remains based on Long Island, married to Alexis Roderick since 2015, and is the father of three daughters — Alexa Ray Joel (with Christie Brinkley), Della Rose, and Remy Anne.

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