Billy Joel

There are artists you admire and others you feel close to. Billy Joel is one of the second kind, and not by chance: he spent his career writing about ordinary people. Waiters, labourers, men sitting at the bar, couples who love each other and grow tired. He was never the most modern or the coolest, and that was never the idea. Two comfortable versions of him also go around that are worth taking apart: that he stopped writing at the top, and that his story is already over. Neither of them holds up.

From Hicksville to a bar in Los Angeles

William Martin Joel was born in the Bronx on 9 May 1949 and grew up in Hicksville, Long Island, in a family that struggled for money after his father left. He took piano lessons as a boy, almost by force. He also boxed for real: he fought on the Golden Gloves circuit and won twenty-two bouts in a row; he gave it up when his nose was broken in fight number twenty-four.

The early seventies were genuinely hard, and he told them without decoration in And So It Goes, the documentary HBO premiered in July 2025. In that period he made two suicide attempts and afterwards checked himself voluntarily into a psychiatric hospital. It is a fact that tends to appear dissolved into the formula "a rough patch of depression as a young man", and the formula takes away the weight it has.

When he came out of there he spent six months playing piano in a bar in Los Angeles, under the false name Bill Martin. Out of that job came "Piano Man", in 1973. The song that defined him for ever is, at bottom, a report from the floor: look at the regulars in a place and write down what is there. Billy Joel's whole method is there, and he had it ready from the very beginning.

A machine for songs that sound old

What came afterwards is a long list: "Just the Way You Are", "New York State of Mind", "She's Always a Woman to Me", "Vienna", "Uptown Girl", "We Didn't Start the Fire". Melodies that sound like folklore, as if nobody in particular had written them. That is the mark of a great songwriter: when the song feels inevitable.

Behind that apparent ease there was craft and an almost classical ear. He could move from rock to doo-wop, from ballad to waltz, and make the seam invisible. He has sold more than 160 million records, the figure his labels and the press coverage use. It is worth correcting in passing a story that is always told wrong, because the right way round it has its charm: "Uptown Girl" was not born thinking about Christie Brinkley. Joel started it as "Uptown Girls", in the plural, when he was going out with the model Elle Macpherson, and moved it to the singular when he began with Brinkley. The song changed addressee halfway through.

His bond with New York ended up taking an unusual form: a monthly residency at Madison Square Garden, from January 2014 until 25 July 2024. It was not a tour passing through, it was a fixed date. He added up 104 consecutive performances and that last show was his 150th at the venue. It is worth saying it in the past, because it is almost always told in the present: the residency closed on a specific date, with the farewell announced.

The one who never stopped writing

It is said that Billy Joel left pop in the mid-nineties and that there lies his character, stopping when he could have gone on squeezing his fame. It is a comfortable reading and he himself disproved it with work. What ended in 1993, with River of Dreams, was the run of pop and rock albums. The songs went on: "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah" came out in 2007, and on 1 February 2024 he released the single "Turn the Lights Back On", which he premiered live at the Grammys three days later. Thirty-one years without a new album are not thirty-one years of silence.

With money he did worse than with songs, although there too the figure needs adjusting. It is repeated that several managers swindled him; what is documented is one case, the lawsuit he filed in 1989 against Frank Weber, his former brother-in-law and manager. And he fought for years against alcohol, something he has told repeatedly without asking for it to be touched up.

What to remember

Billy Joel is the proof that you do not need to reinvent music to be immense: it is enough to tell the truth about ordinary people well and give it a melody you cannot shake off. He wrote for the lonely people in a bar, for clumsy lovers, for those who dream of leaving and for the city he never let go of, and he did it so well that those songs ended up belonging to everyone.

In May 2025 he cancelled — cancelled, not postponed — the seventeen dates he had standing, after being diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus, a neurological disorder. That is usually where the story ends, in the tone of an epitaph, and that is where it goes wrong. In September 2026 he said that a shunt valve had been implanted and that it "improved things: my memory got better, my balance got a little better". And he said a line that closes better than any conclusion of ours: I am still here.

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Sources

Billy Joel (William Martin Joel) was born on 9 May 1949 in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in Hicksville, Long Island. He competed on the Golden Gloves amateur boxing circuit, where he won twenty-two bouts, and left the sport after breaking his nose. In the documentary "And So It Goes" (HBO, July 2025) he recounted that in the early seventies he made two suicide attempts and that he subsequently admitted himself voluntarily to a psychiatric facility. In 1972 he worked for about six months as a pianist in a Los Angeles bar under the pseudonym Bill Martin, an experience that gave rise to "Piano Man" (1973). Among his best-known songs are "Just the Way You Are", "New York State of Mind", "She's Always a Woman to Me", "Vienna", "Uptown Girl" and "We Didn't Start the Fire". "Uptown Girl" was begun as "Uptown Girls", in the plural, during his relationship with the model Elle Macpherson, and moved to the singular when he began his relationship with Christie Brinkley. His sales are estimated at more than 160 million records. He held a monthly residency at Madison Square Garden in New York from January 2014 until 25 July 2024, with 104 consecutive performances; that last show was his 150th concert at the venue. His last pop and rock album of new material is "River of Dreams" (1993), but he released the songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah" in 2007 and the single "Turn the Lights Back On" on 1 February 2024, performed at the Grammy Awards ceremony three days later. In 1989 he sued his former manager Frank Weber for financial damages. He has spoken publicly about his struggle with alcoholism. In May 2025 he cancelled seventeen concerts after being diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus; in September 2026 he reported that a shunt valve had been implanted and stated that his memory and his balance had improved. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Billboard, Rolling Stone, Variety, The New York Times, Wikipedia and other coverage.

If you or someone you know is going through a crisis, in Chile you can call *4141 free of charge and 24 hours a day, the Ministry of Health's suicide prevention line.