Showtime will premiere "The Last Play At Shea" documentary film on its network beginning November 11th, and they've produced this new video below! Be sure to check the reported schedule and Showtime for air times.
In this exclusive video for Billy Joel - The Complete Albums Collection, Billy discusses the pressure to release another album after "Piano Man." That next album became "Streetlife Serenade," which features songs including "The Entertainer" and "Souvenir."
Ultimate Classic Rock has reviewed the song "Josephine" from the new Billy Joel "Piano Man" Legacy Edition, which includes a second CD with a previously unreleased 1972 radio broadcast from WMMR in Philadelphia. Three songs from the WMMR concert -- "Long, Long Time," "Josephine," and "Rosalinda" -- don't appear on any other Billy Joel album. Here is an excerpt from the review:
"Glee" revisits the Billy Joel catalog on Tuesday, November 8th with a performance of his classic song, "Uptown Girl." Check out this video preview from tomorrow night's episode, which airs at 8/7c on FOX:
"I'll wake up at 4:30 in the morning with an idea and think maybe I should write this down but then think, 'Nah, I'm too tired but it's so great I won't forget it.' And I go back to sleep and I wake up later and I think, 'Oh, what was that' -- and it's gone. But not forever. It's not gone from the little mental filing cabinet that we have - it all gets filed away. Later, right in the middle of a conversation it pops back into consciousness and I'll have to go over to the piano and work it out. And that's how I do a lot of writing. It's almost like you didn't have anything to do with it.
"Captain Jack isn't Jack Daniels. I used to live near the projects in Long Island and there were drugs going on and the dealer was called Captain Jack. There was also smack. They used to use the rhyme for smack, Captain Jack. So I didn't mean it to be any specific drug, it's whatever people had to take to escape reality. It was drugs in general. You know I call it a look out the window song. I was just looking out there and seeing all my friends, everybody would just get their brains wasted and fried and I thought it was kind of stupid.
"I wanted to do again what I liked doing when I was in bands in the sixties, bar bands. Rock and roll bands, biker bar bands, blues biker bar bands. So when I started writing the album, I kind of harkened back to those kinds of sounds, band sounds, bluesy. The album has a lot of things that have that kind of feel to it, that are kind of very rock and roll, late sixties rock."
During Billy Joel's worldwide Storm Front Tour, he returned to Australia, and squeezed in a lecture at the Melbourne Music Festival, offering up an evening of Questions and Answers and A Little Music. The questions ran the gamut, and the video below covers how a writer gets into the mood to write, offering insight into Billy's writing process. How do you start a song? Where does it begin? Watch Billy's answer and check out additional videos from our Questions & Answers lecture series.
Is musical talent something that you are born with or something you can learn? Is it something passed along in the genes or something that can be nurtured by a good teacher, parental wishes, and accomplished by hard work? Billy Joel was asked this question during a session recorded by A&E's cameras live at Irvine Auditorium, on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia on November 6, 2001.
In the new video below for Billy Joel - The Complete Albums Collection, Billy talks about the album "Piano Man," which was written after he spent six months working in a piano bar in Los Angeles. The title track became popular on radio stations.
The next video for Billy Joel - The Complete Albums Collection covers the album "Turnstiles." Billy talks about returning to New York, the album's famous cover art, and how the songs on "Turnstiles" focus on the city.
In the latest interview video for Billy Joel - The Complete Albums Collection, Billy talks about "Songs In The Attic," his first live album. The album was "a good opportunity to do a live recording of the older stuff that I never really liked the way it was recorded." Watch what Billy has to say in the video below!
