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.