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His 1978 album 52nd Street (featuring the hit ‘Honesty’ which Joel doesn’t seem to like anymore since it’s often absent from ‘Greatest Hits’ collections) was the very first album to be commercially released on Compact Disc, in Japan in 1982. His album sales are in excess of 150 million. Joel had 3 US Number 1 singles during his illustrious career, ‘It’s Still Rock’n’Roll To Me’ (1980), ‘Tell Her About It’ (1983, a Motown homage from An Innocent Man) and his potted US foreign-policy history lesson ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ which covers the period from Joel’s birth in 1949 to the songs’ release in 1989. Joel has won 6 Grammy Awards (with 23 nominations), was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992 and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999. Announcing his retirement from live concerts at Madison Square Garden on December 31st 1999, Joel has concentrated on classical composition though began touring again in 2006 and is still a huge box-office draw, particularly in the USA, though strangely he doesn’t perform much material from An Innocent Man live any more, considering the songs ‘parodies’ and not reflective of his original composing talent. To date Joel has married and divorced three times, Brinkley four!)īilly Joel gave up releasing new pop material following 1993’s River Of Dreams (perhaps due to his divorce from Christie Brinkley shortly afterwards), his last US Top 50 hit, a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘To Make You Feel My Love’ in 1997, a ‘Greatest Hits’ add-on that year.
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I looked back down at the piano and just said ‘Thank you.’” (It was a timely meeting for Joel who’d just divorced his previous wife and former manager Elizabeth for whom he’d composed ‘Just The Way You Are’ as a birthday gift. Recalling meeting MacPherson, Brinkley and Houston (then working as a model and unknown as a singer) in the Caribbean hotel Joel says he was playing piano in the hotel bar one evening when, “I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano. While ‘Uptown Girl’ is usually assumed to be about Joel’s soon-to-be wife, supermodel Christie Brinkley (who also appeared in the video), the song was actually begun sometime earlier when Joel was dating Brinkley’s supermodel colleague Elle MacPherson (and then entitled ‘Uptown Girls’ after he’d met MacPherson, Brinkley and Whitney Houston at a Caribbean holiday resort), however by the time he got around to polishing up the lyrics, he says the song was focussed entirely on Brinkley. Hubert Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’, not strictly classical I know, but not far from it either! For the wonderfully moving ‘Leningrad’ (1989 – written after he met a clown at a concert there in August 1987) he seems to have borrowed his intro from Brahms’ ‘Waldesnacht’ and finally, ‘And So It Goes’ (1990, actually written for An Innocent Man in 1982 but not fitting the concept and in fact a song Joel had enormous difficulty in completing and not lyrically finished until 1990) is decidedly reminiscent of C. Taken from his album An Innocent Man which was an homage to the music of his youth, ‘Uptown Girl’ was in the style of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons – Valli himself says he loved the song but wishes Joel had given it to them since they needed a hit at the time! Other tracks including ‘This Night’ and ‘The Longest Time’ harked back to the 1950s doo-wop period while there were also songs that reflected the late 1950s rock’n’roll era and the ‘Motown’ and ‘Atlantic’ soul sounds of the 1960s.īilly Joel has often borrowed melodies from his obviously large classical collection and many may not have noticed that ‘Uptown Girl’ has a chorus suspiciously similar to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ while ‘This Night’ (from the same album) comes from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.8, the ‘Pathetique’. This was probably Joel’s biggest hit on a worldwide basis (Number 1 in Australia, his only UK Number 1 and Number 3 in America) and still remains a party floor filler and oldies radio favourite over 30 years on. Quote from The Girl In The Song, Michael Heatley & Frank Hopkinson (Portico Books, 2010)
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Recorded at Chelsea Sound & A&R Recording, New York City “I looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano.”