‘My Lives’: The album Billy Joel said “should never have been heard”
Even if Billy Joel had stopped releasing new music after his fifth album, his place in history would have been assured. From his 1971 debut Cold Spring Harbor to The Stranger in 1977, he had already written and released some of his best known and best loved songs. Timeless classics like ‘Everybody Loves You Now’, ‘Piano Man’, ‘Los Angelenos’, ‘New York State of Mind’, ‘Just the Way You Are, ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, ‘Vienna’ ‘Only the Good Die Young’ and ‘She’s Always a Woman’.
Entire superstar careers have been built on weaker material than this, but Joel wasn’t done yet. He continued to write, record and release new music up until 1993s River of Dreams (in 2001 he released his final studio album, Fantasies & Delusions, a classical collection of opuses composed by Joel and performed on piano by Richard Hyung-ki Joo).
In the 32 years since Billy Joel released his last collection of pop and rock recordings, he has continued to tour the world and tirelessly play sold out shows to his hometown crowd at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Such is his enduring popularity that his label have also continued to tirelessly repackage his older works and plumb the vaults for lost songs, alternate takes and demo recordings.
“I still don’t own my recordings”, Joel said in a 2018 conversation with rock writer David Marchese. “People wonder why there’ve been so many Billy Joel live albums and compilations.” Joel’s extended break from songwriting never stopped Columbia from regularly releasing new product, including three live albums and ten compilations since 1993. “They’re not my idea. The record company owns all these recordings and can package them any way they want. As far as I’m concerned, I did 12 studio albums. The live crap and all these compilations—they don’t mean anything.”
Joel explained that to him, there was some significance to that number of albums as well. “I always looked at The Beatles as a template. They did 12 studio albums. By the time I got to my 12th album, I didn’t think the quality trajectory was going to continue to go up. And I was more interested in other music.”
The constant stream of compilations and ‘live crap’ has not escaped Joel’s attention over the years, but one such release was particularly vexing for the ‘Vienna’ star. “You know, there’s an album Columbia put out called My Lives”, he said. “And it was unfinished stuff that never should have been heard. I didn’t want anything to do with it. I refer to that album as ‘Twigs and Stems and Seeds’—you’re not supposed to smoke that shit.”
A five disc behemoth, My Lives is made up of a slew of demos, outtakes, B-sides, soundtrack songs, live recordings and album cuts spanning Joel’s entire career. A veritable treasure trove for fans, but a peek behind the curtain that Joel never intended for them to see or hear.
Billy Joel may not have consented to the My Lives album, but he did finally share a new song with the world in early 2024—his first in almost 20 years—when he released ‘Turn the Lights Back On’. He was quick to quash any hopes of a new full-length album, though, asking Variety, “Who makes albums anymore anyway? I think the only person making new albums these days is Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo. I don’t know other people who make albums. I don’t know what the marketing of that is like now.”
