Billy Joel

How lucky was I to be ingesting all of this great music in the world as I was a kid? I have the music of Billy Joel and so many others to thank for my career. This is such a fun song. It doesn't sound like any other song from the 80s. It's a love letter to doo-wop, maybe in the way that my album Sob Rock is a love letter to the late 80s. It wasn't until recently that I realized that artists like to go backwards and pay homage to the music that influenced them. And I think Billy Joel did that in the case of this song, "Uptown Girl."

If you're around long enough as a musician, as Billy Joel very much has, your catalog changes as time goes on, especially in terms of what is the most popular to a generation. You could look at the charts and you could say that "Piano Man" is one of his biggest songs. But if you ask anybody under the age of 30 what their favorite Billy Joel song is, it tends to be Vienna. Something about the spirit of that song has leapt out of its time and become very, very relatable today. So that's why I'm going to play the song for you now. I too love Vienna. If you just played me all of this music and I didn't know any of it, I'd say, Vienna must have gone to number one. It didn't, but that's what happens when you're a legendary artist like Billy Joel and all of your songs have something to say.