Billy Joel

The piano player from Hicksville who wrote his way to more than 150 million records and then, at the height of it, stopped. Born in the Bronx on May 9, 1949 and raised on Long Island, Billy Joel released his first album in 1971 and spent the next two decades producing the most durable run of American songwriting of his generation — The Stranger, 52nd Street, Glass Houses, An Innocent Man, Storm Front. He wrote about the places and people that surrounded him rather than the ones a hit record is supposed to be about: a Pennsylvania steel town, a Vietnam veteran who came home to nothing, a Long Island fishing village, a bar on a Wednesday night.

52nd Street won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1980 and, two years later, became the first album commercially released on compact disc. Three of his singles reached No.1 on the Hot 100, including It's Still Rock and Roll to Me and We Didn't Start the Fire. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in 1999, and he received the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize in 2014. After River of Dreams in 1993 he simply stopped writing pop songs, returning in 2024 with Turn the Lights Back On and ending a monthly Madison Square Garden residency that had run for a decade. In May 2025 he canceled his remaining concerts after a diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus, and has not returned to the stage since.