Billy Joel

Few pop songwriters have turned the piano into such a plain-spoken storyteller as Billy Joel. Born in the Bronx in 1949 and raised on Long Island, he started piano lessons at his mother's insistence, left school to chase music and passed through the Echoes, the Hassles and Attila before going solo. Between 1971 and 1993 he wrote every song on twelve studio albums, moving between pop and rock, and his record sales run past 160 million worldwide.

His debut, Cold Spring Harbor, came in 1971. A live radio performance of "Captain Jack" then caught on in Philadelphia and brought a deal with Columbia, which issued Piano Man in 1973. The Stranger (1977) was the breakthrough, selling over 10 million copies and yielding "Just the Way You Are" and "Vienna". 52nd Street (1978) reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and won Album of the Year at the Grammys. An Innocent Man (1983) paid tribute to the doo-wop and R&B of his youth, and in 1987 he toured the Soviet Union. After River of Dreams (1993) he mostly stepped away from studio work, though classical album Fantasies & Delusions appeared in 2001. In 2024 he returned with "Turn the Lights Back On".