Albums : Billy Joel : She's Got A Way : Love Songs
Listen To Billy Joel : She's Got A Way : Love Songs
Who Is Billy Joel?
William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth-best-selling recording artist and the fourth-best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA. He also has the third-best-selling album in the United States with his Greatest Hits Vol. 1 & 2.
Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), and the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped writing and recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.
Joel was born in the Bronx and raised in Hicksville, New York in a Levitt home. His father, Howard (born Helmuth), was born in Germany, the son of German merchant and manufacturer Karl Amson Joel, who, after the advent of the Nazi regime, emigrated to Switzerland and later to the United States.Billy Joel's mother, Rosalind Nyman, was born in England to Philip and Rebecca Nyman. Both of Joel's parents were Jewish. They divorced in 1960, and his father moved to Vienna, Austria. Billy has a sister, Judith Joel, and a half-brother, Alexander Joel, who is an acclaimed classical conductor in Europe and currently chief musical director of the Staatstheater Braunschweig.
Joel's father was an accomplished classical pianist. Billy reluctantly began piano lessons at an early age, at his mother's insistence; his teachers included the noted American pianist Morton Estrin and musician/songwriter Timothy Ford. His interest in music, rather than sports, was a source of teasing and bullying in his early years. (He has said in interviews that his piano instructor also taught ballet. Her name was Frances Neiman, and she was a Juilliard trained musician. She gave both classic piano and ballet lessons in the studio attached to the rear of her house, leading neighborhood bullies to mistakenly think he was learning to dance.) As a teenager, Joel took up boxing so that he would be able to defend himself. He boxed successfully on the amateur Golden Gloves circuit for a short time, winning twenty-two bouts, but abandoned the sport shortly after having his nose broken in his twenty-fourth boxing match.
Joel attended Hicksville High School with the class of 1967. However, he did not graduate. At the time, he was helping his single mother make ends meet by playing at a piano bar, and this interfered with his school attendance.[11] After his senior year, he still was short of the total number of credits he needed to graduate. Rather than attend summer school, Joel decided to quit high school without a diploma in order to begin a career in music. Joel recounted, "I told them, 'To hell with it. If I'm not going to Columbia University, I'm going to Columbia Records and you don't need a high school diploma over there'." Columbia did, in fact, become the label that eventually signed him. In 1992, he submitted essays to the school board and was awarded his diploma at Hicksville High's annual graduation ceremony, 25 years after he had left.
Upon seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, Joel decided to pursue a full-time musical career, and set about finding a local Long Island band to join. Eventually he founded the Echoes, a group that specialized in British Invasion covers. The Echoes became a popular New York attraction, which convinced him to leave high school to become a professional musician. He began playing for the Echoes when he was 14 years old.
Joel began playing recording sessions with the Echoes in 1965, when he was 16 years old. Joel played piano on several recordings produced by Shadow Morton, including (as claimed by Joel, but denied by songwriter Ellie Greenwich) the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack, as well as several records released through Kama Sutra Productions. During this time, the Echoes started to play numerous late-night shows.
Joel began playing recording sessions with the Echoes in 1965, when he was 16 years old. Joel played piano on several recordings produced by Shadow Morton, including (as claimed by Joel, but denied by songwriter Ellie Greenwich) the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack, as well as several records released through Kama Sutra Productions. During this time, the Echoes started to play numerous late-night shows.
Later, in 1965, the Echoes changed their name to the Emeralds and then to the Lost Souls. For two years, Joel played sessions and performed with the Lost Souls. In 1967, he left that band to join the Hassles, a Long Island band that had signed a contract with United Artists Records. Over the next year and a half, they released The Hassles in 1967, Hour of the Wolf in 1968, and four singles, all of which failed commercially. Following The Hassles' demise in 1969, he formed the duo Attila with Hassles drummer Jon Small. Attila released their eponymous debut album in July 1970, and disbanded the following October. The reason for the group's break-up has been attributed to Joel's affair with Small's wife, Elizabeth, whom Joel eventually married. (Read More)
She's Got A Way : Love Songs Review
Billy Joel has experienced love in many forms, good and bad, and much of it in the public eye. Since he is a great musician and songwriter, he has taken all this experience and turned it into memorable music throughout the years between his first album in 1971 and his last release (so far) in 1993. She's Got A Way: Love Songs presents 18 of those love songs.
Some of these songs are well known by everyone with a radio. These are the heartfelt ballads "She's Got A Way" (presented here in a live version), "Just The Way You Are," "She's Always a Woman," "Honesty," and the slightly harder "Shameless" (also a hit for Garth Brooks).
Other songs will only be familiar to those fans who have collected Joel's music through the years. These songs show a great deal of versatility, from the cool, doo-wop "This Night" to the beautiful instrumental "Nocturne" and the '60s-sounding "Until the Night." "This is the Time" is an anthem just made for singing along with at concerts or parties. The styles range from soft rock to classic rock and even country rock, but the emotion is always sincere and the lyrics honest.
This collection will please all of Billy Joel's fans and will possibly convert some people who hear it who have not heard this much variety in Joel's sound before. It's been some years since Joel has put out any new music, and when he appears these days, he has acquired the persona of an "Elder Statesman of Rock." But these songs take us back to an earlier persona, that of the working class hero with the heart of a romantic but a tendency to choose difficult women, as detailed in "Temptation" and "An Innocent Man."
Certainly, each of these songs testifies to Joel's ability to turn a phrase and create a story. This collection will prove to listeners old and new that Joel truly is one of American music's best singer-songwriters. Nobody speaks to the heart better than Billy Joel.
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