Billy Joel (born May 9, 1949) is a singer, songwriter, and pianist from the United States. Known colloquially as “Piano Man” after his famous 1973 tune of the same name, Joel has had a successful solo music career since the 1970s.

From 1971 until 1993, he released twelve studio albums in the pop and rock genres, as well as a one-off studio album of classical music compositions in 2001. With over 160 million records sold globally, Joel is one of the world’s best-selling music artists and the fourth-best-selling solo artist in the United States. Greatest Hits – Volume I & Volume II, his 1985 compilation CD, is one of the best-selling albums in the United States.

How long has Billy Joel been struggling with his mental health?

Elizabeth Weber Small was Joel’s first wife. She was married to Jon Small, his music partner in the short-lived duo Attila, with whom she had a son when their relationship began. Weber ended her relationships with both men after the affair was disclosed. Weber and Joel reconnected and married in 1973, and she later took over as his manager. On July 20, 1982, they filed for divorce.

Joel married for the second time in March 1985, to model Christie Brinkley. Alexa Ray Joel, their daughter, was born on December 29, 1985. Ray Charles, one of Joel’s musical inspirations, inspired Alexa’s middle name. On August 26, 1994, Joel and Brinkley divorced.

Joel checked into Silver Hill Hospital, a substance abuse and psychiatric facility in New Canaan, Connecticut, in 2002 and stayed for 10 days. In March 2005, he checked into the Betty Ford Center, where he spent 30 days for alcohol dependency therapy.

Meanwhile, Billy Joel was born in the Bronx, New York, on May 9, 1949. His family relocated to the Long Island neighborhood of Hicksville, in the town of Oyster Bay, when he was one year old, where he and his cousin Judy, whom his parents adopted, were reared in a part of Levitt’s houses.

Howard (born Helmut) Joel (1923-2011), a classical pianist and businessman, was born to a Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany, the son of trader and manufacturer Karl Amson Joel, and schooled in Switzerland. Joel Macht Fabrik was his father’s tremendously successful mail-order textile firm. Howard’s family fled to Switzerland to avoid the Nazi government. To emigrate, his father sold his firm for a fraction of its value.

Because immigration limitations for German Jews barred direct entry at the time, the family arrived in the United States via Cuba. Howard studied engineering in the United States but always had a passion for music. Rosalind (1922-2014), Joel’s mother, was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents, Philip and Rebecca Nyman, who came from England.

Joel’s parents met at a Gilbert and Sullivan concert at City College of New York in the late 1930s. He has stated that neither of his parents talked much about the dreadful years of World War II; it was only later that Joel discovered more about his father’s family.

After Rosalind and Howard Joel separated in 1957, Howard fled to Europe because he disliked the United States and thought its inhabitants were uneducated and materialistic. He eventually remarried and resided in Vienna, Austria. Joel has a half-brother, Alexander Joel, who was born in Europe to his father and went on to become a classical conductor there. From 2001 to 2014, Alexander Joel was the Staatstheater Braunschweig’s chief musical director.

Even though his parents were Jewish, Joel was not raised in the faith, explaining, “My parents were both from Jewish homes. I was not raised Jewish in any religious sense. My circumcision was as Jewish as you could get.” He and his friends went to a Roman Catholic church. He was baptized at the age of 11 in a Church of Christ in Hicksville. He now considers himself an atheist.