Billy Joel picks his favourite Billy Joel songs
Energised by the early rhythm and blues artists of the 1950s, Billy Joel was still just like any other young American music fanatic until he saw The Beatles’ famous debut on US television. When a 14-year-old Joel sat in front of the TV for the Ed O’Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964, a future manifested in his mind’s eye.
“That one performance changed my life,” Joel once recalled via TV Guide Magazine. “Up to that moment, I’d never considered playing rock as a career. And when I saw four guys who didn’t look like they’d come out of the Hollywood star mill, who played their own songs and instruments, and especially because you could see this look in John Lennon’s face – and he looked like he was always saying: ‘Fuck you!’ — I said: ‘I know these guys, I can relate to these guys, I am these guys. This is what I’m going to do — play in a rock band.'”
While The Beatles inspired Joel’s early zeal for music, his tastes turned to heavier stuff in the late ’60s. After being exposed to the sound of groups like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, Joel and his high school friend John Small began making proto-metal music in their early band, Atilla.
As a piano man, Joel brought a unique edge to the heavy metal genre, which was traditionally guitar-driven. “End of the sixties, I was in a two-man group,” Joel recalled in a 1985 interview with Dan Neer. “We were heavy metal; we were going to destroy the world with amplification.”
“We had titles like Godzilla, March of the Huns, Brain Invasion,” he continued. “A lot of people think [I] just came out of the piano bar… I did a lot of heavy metal for a while. We had about a dozen gigs, and nobody could stay in the room when we were playing. It was too loud. We drove people literally out of clubs. [They would say,] ‘It was great, but we can’t stay in the club.'”
Eventually, Attila disbanded after Joel began an affair with Small’s wife, Elizabeth Weber Small, whom he eventually married. Joel embarked on his now legendary solo career in 1971 with his debut LP, Cold Spring Harbor. However, it wasn’t until 1973’s follow-up, Piano Man, that Joel would finally break through to global recognition.
Joel has led a wildly eclectic career through his transition from metal to Piano Man and from there to the ‘Uptown Girl’ pop sounds of the 1980s. In an interview with Stephen Colbert in 2017, the singer-songwriter was tasked with picking out his five favourite Billy Joel tracks. Apart from two tracks from 1977’s The Stranger, Joel appears to have a soft spot for his ’80s output.
See the five songs he listed below.
Billy Joel picks his favourite Billy Joel songs:
- ‘You May Be Right’ – Glass Houses
- ‘Scenes From An Italian Restaurant’ – The Stranger
- ‘She’s Right On Time’ – The Nylon Curtain
- ‘And So It Goes’ – Storm Front
- ‘Vienna’ – The Stranger
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