Over the course of his career, Billy Joel has released a series of remarkable albums that together chart his journey as an artist from relative obscurity to international success. In Experiencing Billy Joel, musician and writer Thomas MacFarlane explores that musical journey, from Joel’s apprenticeship in the Long Island music scene to his experiences in both New York and Los Angeles writing and recording his own unique brand of piano rock and pop. After achieving a certain degree of musical success in the late 1960s, Joel embarked on a career as a singer-songwriter in the early 1970s. Although his initial albums demonstrated a precocious mastery that helped establish him in the field, his full potential as a recording artist blossomed on The Stranger (1977), created under the guidance of legendary producer Phil Ramone. Subsequent releases explored a variety of musical styles and helped solidify Joel’s reputation as one of the most important pop composers of his era. Experiencing Billy Joel explores each of Joel’s albums, laying out their appeal to musicians and non-musicians alike while also exploring the various production styles that have characterized Joel’s development in the studio. Along the way, MacFarlane reveals how Billy Joel’s recorded works as a whole serve as the foundation for a complex and enduring musical legacy.

The all-access biography and unprecedented look at the life, career, and legacy of a pint-sized kid from Long Island who became a music legend. “A funny, revealing, and poignant look at [Billy] Joel’s long career.”—Boston Globe Exhibiting unparalleled intimate knowledge, Schruers chronicles Joel’s rise to the top of the charts, from his working-class origins in Levittown and early days spent in boxing rings and sweaty clubs to his monumental success in the seventies and eighties. He also explores Joel’s creative transformation in the nineties, his dream performance with Paul McCartney at Shea Stadium in 2008, and beyond. Along the way, Schruers reveals the stories behind all the key events and relationships—including Joel’s high-profile marriages and legal battles—that defined his path to stardom and inspired his signature songs, such as “Piano Man,” “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” “New York State of Mind,” and “She’s Always a Woman.” Throughout, he captures the spirit of a restless artist determined to break through by sharing, in his deeply personal lyrics, the dreams and heartbreaks of suburban American life. Comprehensive, vibrantly written, and filled with Joel’s memories and reflections—as well as those of the family, friends, and band members who have formed his inner circle, including Christie Brinkley, Alexa Ray Joel, Jon Small, and Steve Cohen—this is the definitive account of a beloved rock star’s epic American journey.

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). David Rosenthal has carefully arranged all the tracks from Joel's classic 1973 release to combine the piano parts and vocal melodies into playable arrangements while transcribing those classic piano parts that are integral to each song. This book features the iconic title track and nine others: Ain't No Crime * (The) Ballad of Billy the Kid * Captain Jack * If I Only Had the Words (To Tell You) * Somewhere Along the Line * Stop in Nevada * Travelin' Prayer * Worse Comes to Worst * You're My Home.

A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths. In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recognized as a modern, technologically mediated art form to rank alongside cinema and photography. In a thoroughgoing engagement with Adorno's fierce critique of "standardized light popular music," Dialectic of Pop tracks the transformations of the pop form and its audience over the course of the twentieth century, from Hillbilly to Beyoncé, from Lead Belly to Drake. Inseparable from the materiality of its technical media, indifferent and intractable to the perspectives of high culture, pop subverts notions of authenticity and inauthenticity, original and copy, aura and commodity, medium and message. Gayraud demonstrates that, far from being the artless and trivial mass-produced pabulum denigrated by Adorno, pop is a rich, self-reflexive artform that recognises its own contradictions, incorporates its own productive negativity, and often flourishes by thinking "against itself." Dialectic of Pop sings the praises of pop as a constitutively impure form resulting from the encounter between industrial production and the human predilection for song, and diagnoses the prospects for twenty-first century pop as it continues to adapt to ever-changing technological mediations.

Billy Joel chronicles his musician's career while also offering insight into the details of his personal life, including his second marriage to model Christie Brinkley.

(Piano Vocal). This sheet music features an arrangement for piano and voice with guitar chord frames, with the melody presented in the right hand of the piano part, as well as in the vocal line.

Miscellaneous Percussion Music - Mixed Levels