Billy Joel

The Boxer Who Didn't Want to Be a Squirrel

Billy Joel didn't start out sitting at the piano with a glass of wine. Before the stadiums and world tours, the kid from Hicksville made a living throwing punches in the ring. He won twenty-two bouts as an amateur boxer on the Golden Gloves circuit, but a broken nose in his last fight forced him to hang up the gloves. That survival instinct was the only thing that saved him when his first solo album hit the market at the wrong speed.

Cold Spring Harbor was released in 1971 with a mastering defect that made his voice sound extremely high-pitched. Joel threw the vinyl against the wall when he first heard it and left New York for the other side of the country. That production error almost ended his career before it began.

He hid under the alias Bill Martin.

For six months, he worked at a piano bar in Los Angeles called The Executive Room. There he wrote a portrait of the regulars and the bartenders who felt like failures. But that song everyone sings today was not an immediate hit. In 1973, he recorded Piano Man, and the record label had to cut the length of the original track because radio programmers refused to play a five-minute ballad.

The Sound of the Street 52

Luck changed when the musician decided he didn't need California producers to sound like a guy from Long Island. In 1977, he teamed up with Phil Ramone, and the result was The Stranger. That album sold ten million copies in the United States alone and knocked Simon & Garfunkel off the top spot as the best-selling record in Columbia Records history up to that point.

And the gamble paid off.

Joel wrote about the asphalt and disappointments of the working class with perfect pop song structures. But the music press of the time criticized him for being too commercial or for jumping from one style to another without warning. He didn't mind. In 1980, he released Glass Houses to prove he could play hard rock, and in 1983 he put out An Innocent Man as a tribute to the vocal groups of his childhood.

Success did not bring him peace of mind. In the early 1980s, he was in a motorcycle accident that nearly destroyed his hands, and shortly after, he discovered that his former manager had swindled him out of a fortune. So he threw himself into nonstop touring to recover what he had lost.

The Retirement and the Classical Refuge

In 1993, he released River of Dreams and decided he no longer had anything more to say in the world of pop. He grew tired of the charts and the pressure to write catchy hooks. From that point on, his output focused on classical music, and in 2001 he released Fantasies and Delusions. These were solo piano pieces that had nothing to do with his old radio hits.

His creative silence lasted three decades.

Even though he wasn't recording new material, he became the undisputed king of New York's Madison Square Garden. In 2014, he launched a historic residency at the venue that allowed him to play once a month, with tickets selling out consistently. No other artist has managed to maintain such high demand without the support of constant record releases.

In 2024, he broke his songwriting retirement with the single Turn the Lights Back On. The song debuted at number 73 on the Billboard Hot 100 in its first week. His residency at Madison Square Garden officially ended in July 2024 after he completed one hundred and fifty consecutive concerts in front of nineteen thousand people each night.