The musician Billy Joel completely admired: “I loved everything he did”
Ideally, if you’re going to have a reasonable shot at fame and success as a band or an artist, you want to be able to give yourself a decent window of opportunity in which you can win over an audience and maintain them over the course of several releases.
If you look at most musical icons, they haven’t retired young and have kept releasing new music until they felt the well had run dry, and in the case of someone like Billy Joel, who released 13 studio albums over a span of 40 years, it worked in his favour to have a lengthy career.
However, not everyone has the privilege of this, and while some artists burn bright at the start of their careers and fizzle out just as quickly into relative obscurity, others find their careers cut short by tragedy, leaving only the music they recorded during their lifetime behind. Although there are some artists who pass away young without ever having released their finest work, there are plenty that managed to cram in multiple records that have stood the test of time despite not being able to follow up.
For example, the three records left behind by Nirvana helped popularise an entire movement in grunge, and the death of Kurt Cobain didn’t stop the group from continuing to be popular in the years after his death. Similarly, even though the remaining members of Joy Division went on to form New Order, it doesn’t matter that Ian Curtis only has two albums to offer, because they’re still listened to and regarded as two of the finest post-punk records of all time.
Despite Joel’s lengthy career and time taken between releasing records in some instances, he respects the fact that some artists have been able to fit a large body of work into a short amount of time, never failing to live up to expectations on every release despite the rushed time constraints.
In a 2025 episode of the Club Random Podcast, Joel found himself engaged in a candid discussion with host Bill Maher about acts who managed to make the most of a short-lived career, and while there was some disagreement over the merits of Cream, who released four albums in only three years, Maher couldn’t help but concede to Joel’s opinion when it came to another artist who successfully managed to make his stamp in the same amount of time.
Speaking about the legendary work of Jimi Hendrix, Joel’s eyes lit up as though he were still in awe of what the masterful guitarist managed to achieve. “It was as if he squeezed his entire life into three years,” Joel proclaimed. “He only had a three-year career, and then he was dead. He died at 27 when he was just getting started. If you look at the amount of work he was able to do, there was so much crammed into a short amount of time, but I loved everything he did.”
Over the course of three albums, Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland, Hendrix not only defied the odds of continually stunning his audience with his power but also managed to remain an influence on guitarists and other virtuoso musicians to this day, even 55 years after his death.
It’s remarkable that any artist can have three classic albums in their repertoire, and it’s perhaps even more impressive when those are the only three albums that were offered in the same number of years.
