In interviews, if there’s a piano nearby, he jumps up frequently to move toward the keyboard to illustrate a point, tell a story.

Though he’s talky and sharp, quick with a joke (and perhaps to light up your smoke), Billy Joel speaks most fluently with his fingers. There’s a quirkiness in individually produced pianos that I appreciate, sort of like handmade guitars.” “They make pianos the old-fashioned way,” he has said. He’s proud, he says, to represent Steinway. I don’t know how crazy he is to have me hanging next to him,” he joked at the installation ceremony, before turning serious: “I’m honored to be hung in Steinway Hall, among these great artists,” he said. His portrait hangs alongside those of legendary musicians including Sergei Rachmaninoff, Franz Liszt, Arthur Rubinstein, Ignacy Paderewski and more. Joel is the first non-classical pianist to be immortalized in the Steinway Hall collection. In 2012, the Piano Man was honored by Steinway & Sons with a painted portrait installed in Steinway Hall in Manhattan. In fact, he dropped out of high school to help his mother pay the bills by playing piano in local bars, and the trajectory of his musical career has since led him through 33 top ten hits, six Grammy awards and sales of more than 150 million records. So Joel put the classical lessons behind him, and he soon found his footing playing popular piano music to receptive crowds. I have strong hands but short fingers,” he said.

“I don’t have the Rachmaninoff hands, the Horowitz hands. “I realized early on, I’m not going to be a concert pianist,” he told Alec Baldwin last year during a radio interview. But he realized as a young teen that his musical career would follow a different path. Born in the Bronx and raised in the suburbs of Hicksville, he started studying piano at age four, following in the footsteps of his father, a classically-trained pianist. Like the Steinway & Sons pianos he plays, Joel is a New York original. The new album brings together some of Joel’s most evocative and moving love songs, with iconic hits playing alongside lesser-known selections, including “Just the Way You Are,” “Honesty,” “She’s Always a Woman,” “Travelin’ Prayer” (the b-side of the “Piano Man” single), the haunting instrumental “Nocturne” (from 1971’s Cold Spring Harbor) and Joel’s version of “Shameless” (a #1 country smash for Garth Brooks). But clearly, judging by the crooning on She’s Got a Way, the man knows a thing or two about passion.

He jokes often, albeit a bit ruefully, about other loves won and lost, sometimes referring to his wives (a trio) as Ex-One, Ex-Two and Ex-Three. For Joel, a love for the classical music he’s been rediscovering after his long career in rock and pop is strong.

Story behind uptown girl billy joel