When he was 21, after his band broke up and his girlfriend left him, he tried to kill himself by drinking furniture polish (he "took the Pledge"). He learned that furniture polish doesn't kill you, it just gets you really sick. After the incident, he checked himself into a hospital for depression, which he later said was a great experience, since he saw people who had far worse problems and learned to stop feeling sorry for himself.
In 1970, he released an album with Attila, a really bad heavy metal duo that promised to "destroy the world through amplification." (It actually said that in the liner notes of their album.)
In 2001, he sold his house in The Hamptons to Jerry Seinfeld for $32 million. Joel forgot to tell Seinfeld that it overlooked a nude beach.
His first solo album, Cold Spring Harbor, was recorded at the wrong speed. The vocals were too fast and made Joel's voice sound unnatural.
Joel's father was a pianist and met his mother when she was singing at the City College of New York in a Gilbert and Sullivan company.
In the mid-'90s, Joel was part of a series of protests on Long Island in New York. The state was going to ban haul-seining (the traditional method of catching striped bass). This would have put a lot of fisherman out of work. Joel said his interest was because it was an old tradition in his community. That's why he frequently risked arrest in support of the fishermen.
Joel married supermodel Christie Brinkley in 1985; they divorced in 1994, supposedly because of Joel's busy road schedule. They met in 1983 when Joel was playing a hotel bar in St. Barts. The couple remained close after their split, and Billy went to Christie's wedding in 1996 (that was her fourth marriage - it ended in 2008).
Brinkley named her 2025 memoir Uptown Girl and offered this explanation for her split with Joel: "I never wanted to end things with Billy. But his drinking was bigger than the both of us."
Growing up in Hicksville, New York (on Long Island), Joel was a boxer for three years. He broke his nose, but was crowned Local Welterweight Champ of Hicksville in 1964.
Joel's father left when Billy was 7 years old; he says he boxed to "settle my male identity crisis."
He toured several times with fellow pianist Elton John. They played together at the Concert for New York City, a benefit concert for the policemen and firefighters involved in the World Trade Center attacks in late 2001.
Many critics trashed him in the '70s. Joel used to tear up their reviews onstage.
In 1992, Joel was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 1999, he made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Yankee Stadium's first rock concert featured Billy Joel on his 1989 Storm Front tour.
Joel has seen many legal battles over the years. He sued his ex-manager and ex-brother-in-law Frank Weber for fraud and misappropriation of funds. He also sued ex-lawyer Allen Grubman for fraud, malpractice, and breach of contract.
Joel has stated he is an atheist, although he believes he has reached some spiritual planes through music.
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Amy - Chicago, IL
Joel was raised as a non-practicing Jew. As a boy, he would go with his Catholic friends to Sunday Mass. He said he was "busted" when he started giggling in a confessional booth.
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Ken - Louisville, KY
He was the last artist to play Shea Stadium, which is where the New York Mets play. Joel will be the first artist in history to play all 4 of New York City's major sports venues: Shea, Yankee Stadium, Giants Stadium and Madison Square Garden.
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Bertrand - Paris, France
In 2003, he won a Tony Award for the orchestration of his Broadway musical
Movin' Out.
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Suggestion credit:
Bertrand - Paris, France
Joel was a rock critic in the early '70s for the magazines Changes and Go!. After giving Al Kooper's Super Session a bad review, he felt horrible and quit the gig. Many years later, he was asked to be a judge on American Idol, and turned down the gig because he didn't like to judge musicians. Steven Tyler filled the position.
As far as piano players go, Steve Winwood is his favorite. Joel says that Winwood plays all the right piano notes the same way Clapton does on guitar.
Billy Joel's first wife was his business manager, Elizabeth Weber Small, the former wife of his music partner, Jon Small (in the short-lived duo Attila). With his second wife, model and actress Christie Brinkley, he has a daughter, singer Alexa Ray Joel, whose middle name is after Ray Charles, one of Joel's musical idols.
Joel married his third wife, 23-year-old Katie Lee, on October 2, 2004. At the time of the wedding, Joel was 55. The pair split after five years of marriage.
Joel tied the knot with his fourth wife, Alexis Roderick, an equestrian and former Morgan Stanley executive, on July 4, 2015 during an unanticipated ceremony at his estate on Long Island. The couple, who had been together since 2009, surprised guests by getting married during their annual July 4th party.
Joel told
The New York Times Magazine in 2013 that when he was in a financial crunch a few years previously, he sold a house he was building in the Hamptons to Jerry Seinfeld, and his New York City home to
Sting. "I was praying for a rock star," Joel said of the latter property. "They don't care what their accountant says. If they want something, they buy it."
Joel hates seeing himself on album covers, but his label liked his image there since it was good for marketing. For the photo shoot for his 1982 album The Nylon Curtain, Billy showed up with an actual curtain that he used to obscure himself in the pictures. Rather than use the Billy-under-a-curtain images, they commissioned an illustration instead. Joel's compromise was a photo of himself reading a paper on the back cover.
Drummer Liberty DeVitto logged the most years in Joel's band, joining in 1976 and staying on until about 2003. In our
interview with DeVitto, he explained that when they would make an album, Joel would have just a few songs hashed out, but came with lots of ideas. "On the first day, we'd run over the songs that he had - the two or three songs," he said. "And then he would play ideas, and the band would play along with the ideas, and if the ideas started to feel good, he would go home and complete the song. Finish writing it. And then the next day, he would come in and we would record it."
Billy Joel told Long Island's BEACH magazine that pasta is his favorite food and that if it was his last meal, he'd eat a "pile" of it.
He tried writing an autobiography, but the publisher wanted more salacious details than Joel could or would provide, so he gave back his advance and scrapped the project.
Billy Joel is the first musician to clock up a century of performances at Madison Square Garden. On July 18, 2018, Governor Andrew Cuomo proclaimed the date to be Billy Joel Day in New York State to mark his 100th appearance at the famous venue.
He didn't participate in a documentary about his life until 2025, when he let the producers of Billy Joel: And So It Goes interview him for the film.
