John Sheridan ELA 8Th Grade

John Sheridan ELA – 8th Grade Exit Project June 10, 2016 Billy Joel Billy Joel is an incredibly popular musician best known for his piano playing. His style of music is called singer/songwriter since he writes and sings all his own music. He’s been recording music as a professional musician since 1971 and is currently playing one sold out show a month at Madison Square Garden, a schedule that will continue until the shows stop selling out. (As of right now, this has been going on for three years and every show sells out instantly, so there’s no end in sight.) Because of this unique arrangement, he holds the record for most ever concerts played at Madison Square Garden. Billy Joel was born May 9, 1949 in The Bronx, but he moved to Levittown, Long Island at a very early age. He started to play the piano thanks to a combination of 2 factors: His father was a classically trained piano player and his mother pushed him into taking lessons. Even though classical music ran in his blood, seeing The Beatles playing their songs on TV turned Billy toward to world of rock and roll. His first attempts at becoming a rock star turned out badly. The record company he signed his contract with treated him terribly, his first album was a disaster and Billy grew frustrated. At the age of 23, he quit the music business and moved to Los Angeles. Destiny is a funny thing though. While he was living in Los Angeles, a song he had recorded back in New York (that wasn’t on his disastrous first album) was being played on the radio. Suddenly new record companies were trying to track him down to capitalize on his sudden, out of nowhere popularity. It seemed like the best way for Billy Joel to reach his dream was to give up on it. Success came quickly and often after that. His songs ended up in the Top 20 on the charts. Music videos were played all day on MTV. He married Christie Brinkley, one of the most successful supermodels of the time. In 1989 he was given the Grammy Legend award to recognize the length, success and quality of his career. This is after winning 6 Grammy awards for his songs and albums. In 1999 he was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2013 was given the Kennedy Center Honors, an award given to American artists who have created works with long-lasting impacts on society. Billy Joel retired from recording new music in 1994, except for one individual song he released in 2007. He’s had some problems in his life: Rehab for alcohol abuse, divorces and a period of time where he lost all his money thanks to an accountant who made bad investments. As a way of getting back into music, he wrote and released classical music for the first time in his life. Critic reviews weren’t kind, but it was more about being creative for him than trying to be successful. This opportunity to make new music inspired Billy to start playing concerts again regularly. Based on the popularity of his old songs, all of his concert tours have been extremely successful. He is worth an estimated $160 million today.

The Pixies While Billy Joel has had a successful career by anybody’s definition, The Pixies really can’t match up to him in that way. They never made a lot of money, never sold a lot of records, never played sold out concerts at theaters the size of Madison Square Garden. (Even though, if you look at Spotify, Billy Joel’s most successful song has been played 64,596,767 times and The Pixies most popular song has been played 64,097,070 times. Maybe they’re not that far apart after all.) Their success is measured in respect. The respect of their peers and fans. The respect of the young musicians who heard their music and said, “I want to be in a band just like The Pixies.” If you calculated how much they’re worth based on the music they inspired, then The Pixies are like diamonds: so big you can’t even imagine how much they’re worth. The Pixies are a four-person band that started in Boston, Massachusetts in the late-80s. After bouncing back and forth between Boston, Los Angeles and Puerto Rico, their lead singer Charles Thompson (known by the nickname Black Francis) convinced his college roommate Joey Santiago to quit school and join a band. After placing an ad in a local newspaper looking for musicians, they met Kim Deal who recommended her friend David Lovering to complete the group. The Pixies were born. Slowly but surely they began to play concerts around their hometown at any club, bar or birthday party that would have them. As a group their policy was to never play “cover versions” of someone else’s songs, only originals that they wrote themselves. This policy was both a blessing and a curse: It made them become a better band, making all the creative decisions that go into writing a song, but it limited their popularity because crowds usually want to hear songs they already know when they go out. Very early in their career The Pixies were taking a stand for creativity, which was a sign of what they would do for the next 10 years. One person who appreciated their policy was music producer Steve Albini who saw them play a live show one night. “Each song they played was better than the last. I felt like I was discovering The Beatles,” he said in an interview. With Albini’s help, the band recorded their first album, Surfer Rosa, in 1988. The album was reviewed very well by critics and loved by DJs at college radio stations, but didn’t sell many copies. This was another sign of how the rest of their career would go. When a band gets good reviews from the “right” critics and inspires a small, but loyal following of fans, a major record label usually comes calling. This led to The Pixies best-selling album Doolittle, released in 1989. Success never got any closer for the band than this album with its multiple hit singles on alternative music radio stations. Every time they released a new album, they got great reviews, a slightly larger amount of sales, a few songs played on certain radio stations, and that was it. Never really breaking through to big time success grew frustrating and in 1993, the band broke up. A few reunion tours have happened though, and a strange thing became clear: The Pixies are more popular now than they were when they first started. Most people feel that their style of music came out a few years too soon, that the bands they inspired (like Nirvana) hadn’t become popular yet, giving people a chance to become familiar with their sound. The Pixies might not have been appreciated in their time as well as they should’ve been, but the respect that people have for them now hopefully makes up for that.