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Hearing a Bob song, it’s like you struck gold.
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Anybody that says they didn’t do it for that reason is full of shit. Why can’t I do another kind of music? Look, the only reason to get up onstage and make an idiot out of yourself is to meet chicks. I’ve been doing this for 30 years - longer, actually. Musicians complain all the time that they feel like they’re on a treadmill. Here I am, I’m 48 – I got to write another kind of music. I think I’m as pissed off now as I was 10 years ago.
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I don’t have a soft cock – I got a hard cock. If I was a listener, and all I knew was “Tell Her About It,” “It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me” and “Uptown Girl,” I wouldn’t like Billy Joel, neither. Fifty percent of the music on my albums is hard rock. I know I’m perceived as a mainstay of soft rock - which to me is like soft cock. They’re going to country, they’re going to classic rock or … I hate to call it easy listening. They don’t like what they’re hearing, and they’re not buying it. The boomers are out of the pop field right now. It seems like the music business has taken a huge dump. They hold the light bulb, and the entire world revolves around them. You know this joke? How many lead singers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Guys in bands never really respect the singer, ’cause if you can scream in key, you can sing. In a way, I’m a snob, because I play an instrument.
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People don’t go to hear instrumental music unless it’s for free in the park. On a more visceral level: Stadiums full of people don’t go to hear classical music.Īlthough they go see the Three Tenors, don’t they?īut they’re singers, personalities. We’re all trying to do something different. Bruce is being John Steinbeck with a guitar. But now you got Elton doing Disney musicals. It’s funny, these alternative bands that say, “We are the anti-stars.” They don’t think we felt the same way? We didn’t like a lot of the cheese-bag shit that came before us, either.
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Every radio station is trying to copy Howard Stern. The formats that have opened up in the last couple of years are celebrity oriented: E!, Access Hollywood, Extra, Entertainment Tonight. We’re disenchanted with having to be salesmen. Many artists your age seem to be exploring different avenues. “The Longest Time” was written originally as a classical piece, like Haydn. “She’s Always a Woman” is a baroque piano piece. The piano interlude before “The Stranger” is classical. But the music I’m writing now isn’t that different from what I’ve written all along. Then when I got to be 13, this hot seductress in shredded fishnet stockings swept me away: I had a passionate affair with rock & roll. I started out learning classical music from the age of 4. Over a terrific bottle of red wine in an Italian restaurant - natch - in midtown Manhattan, he explains why. The album - titled Greatest Hits Volume III because his first best-of collection was a double-disc set - features favorites like “An Innocent Man” and “Shameless,” along with versions of Leonard Cohen’s “Light as the Breeze,” Carole King and Jerry Goffin’s “Hey Girl” and a new Bob Dylan song, the single “To Make You Feel My Love.” The announcement part is a bit stranger: Joel has, at least temporarily, stopped writing pop music in favor of instrumental classical pieces. BILLY JOEL IS BACK with a new album and an announcement.
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