The moment Barbara Streisand sent Billy Joel an album: “I became legit”
What, in your mind, constitutes ‘making it big’?
Having a number one hit is a decent indicator of success, as is embarking on a worldwide tour or a festival headline slot, but what if it took a simple seal of approval from someone else for people to recognise your importance?
By 1980, Billy Joel had achieved all of the usual markers of fame and success and was seemingly only on an upward trajectory. He’d started gaining even more traction in the charts compared to where he started in the early part of the 1970s, and was being handed more opportunities to perform on the most grandiose stages across the globe.
By most people’s estimation, Joel was ‘big’ by this point, but does that make him ‘big’ in the eyes of everyone else around him? You could argue that Joel was a household name, but whether or not you could hold a conversation about his work with someone of an older generation was another question entirely.
To put things bluntly, he wasn’t Barbra Streisand levels of ‘big’. He hadn’t won a Grammy by the age of 21, nor had he had a successful career in film as well as in music that earned him an Academy Award only five years later, and he hadn’t been beloved by fans on the opposite side of the world for almost two decades. Streisand had done all of these things.
It’s a relative scale, though, and relative to Streisand, Joel may not have been as big, but was still big enough to be celebrated and applauded for his efforts. You don’t have to reach the upper echelons of notoriety in order for your name to go down in history, and therefore, surely Joel had done enough to be considered one of the most important artists of a generation by this point.
However, what truly elevated him to star status was that Streisand covered his 1976 song, ‘New York State of Mind’ only a year after its original release, and even though it was only an album track, the album in question, Superman, was 2x Platinum certified in the US. What’s more, it managed to earn him the approval of someone dearly important to him who had previously not considered him to be a legitimate artist.
During a 1982 interview with Playboy, Joel spoke about the impact that Streisand’s cover of his song had on his career, and explained that from that point forward, people’s perception of him began to change for the better.
“It was amazing,” he exclaimed. “She sent me an album and inscribed it: ‘Dear Billy, Thanks for the song, hope you like it. Love, Barbra.’ I still have it in a frame. My mother came over and saw it; all of a sudden, I became legit in her mind. The fact that Barbra did the song made other people pay attention.”
The song has since gone on to be covered by countless artists and is now seen as something of a pop standard, but Streisand starting this trend was arguably what propelled Joel further in the eyes of many, his own mother included. If Joel wasn’t already big before the release of ‘New York State of Mind’, he was positively gargantuan after Streisand got involved.
