Joel Album a Hit on Classic Charts
Nov. 15 -- It's always been so easy to sing along to Billy Joel's music. But not anymore. His new songs don't have any lyrics.
Some people laughed when the piano man announced that he was doing a classical album. They laughed even harder when he announced that he wouldn't actually play on the album himself — he'd hired a young classical pianist named Richard Joo to do it for him. But the joke is on them. Fantasies and Delusions has hit No. 1 on the classical music charts.
Joel, 52, told ABCNEWS Radio that he likes the fact that his classical music, for the most part, doesn't have lyrics. It lets the listeners decide for themselves what the songs are about. "The power of music is that it's in the mind of the listener to create," Joel says. "You're actually taking it wherever you want to take it."
Videos of the Mind
For many of Joel's fans, just hearing such hits as "Uptown Girl" brings them back to the famous video of him as a mechanic, singing to ex-wife Christie Brinkley. Now such imagery is going to be left to listeners, and that's the way he wants it.
"You're not being so literal," he says. "You're being abstract. However, you are creating an emotional context and listeners can make up their own story and apply it to their own lives."
As much as he's known as a pop songwriting machine, this inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counts Beethoven and Mozart among his biggest influences, ranking them up there with the Beatles.
As a kid, he even tried his hand at classical composing, to get out of practicing piano.
"My mother would say, 'You stay in that room, play the piano,and you ain't getting out of that room until you put in yourhour!" Joel told the Associated Press. "I had to fool my mother, who had a good ear. … [so] I just made up my own Mozart."
After selling more than 100 million albums in the pop world, his turn to classical music was fraught with danger. "I had people who looked and went, 'What? You want to go from selling millions of albums to what, hundreds of albums?' I said, 'Well, it's going to happen anyway probably," he said.
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