Billy Joel at Home: 10 Photos of the Piano Man Through the Decades

For Billy Joel, New York is more than just a place. It’s an inextricable part of what makes the singer who he is. “My speech patterns are New York. The music that I like, it was all New York–based. That’s what I think of when I think of home,” he said in his 2025 HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. “It’s my roots.”The Bronx native grew up in Hicksville, a middle-class suburb of Nassau County on Long Island. His family struggled to make ends meet. “There was poor, and then there was Billy Joel poor. He was lucky if he had enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes,” his childhood friend and fellow musician Jon Small said in And So It Goes. According to Joel’s sister Judy, no matter how hard times were, their mother Rosalind insisted he take piano lessons. His talent “had to be nurtured,” Judy said in the HBO doc. “She knew that he was going to be something someday.”Before he indeed became something, Joel worked on an oyster boat. “I used to look up at this mansion on the hill and wonder what it would be like to live in a house like that,” he said in the documentary, referencing the waterfront property on Centre Island he nicknamed MiddleSea. “I used to think, ‘They’re rich bastards. They never had to work a day in their life.’ Well, I own that house now. It’s not finished yet. And neither am I.”Read on for a glimpse into the Grammy winner’s life, from his early days in New York to his brief stint in Los Angeles and return home.Joel at home in 1976. Photo: Peppler/Newsday RM via Getty ImagesNew York state of mindJoel’s music career took the Long Island native to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and he signed with Columbia Records in 1973. After three years in LA, he and his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, returned to his home state, where he completed his fourth studio album, Turnstiles. “I wanted to get back to New York and make more of a rock and roll album,” Joel explained in And So It Goes. “I was on a bus on my way back to Highland Falls, New York. Elizabeth found us a house up on the Hudson River, and it was fall. It was just gorgeous. The colors were ablaze, the trees were, like, gold and red, and I remember thinking, ‘This is the New York State that I loved when I was a kid. This is magic. We don’t have this in California.’ And I wrote this love song to New York on the bus.” It would become “New York State of Mind,” one of Joel’s most popular tunes.The singer-songwriter poses with some of his records in January 1978. Photo: Michael Putland/Getty ImagesGoing goldJoel’s fifth studio album, 1977’s The Stranger, was a runaway success—but the singer, pictured alongside his accolades in New York in 1978, told Playboy a few years later that his newfound fortune didn’t faze him. “I read these stories about Peter Frampton’s multimillion-dollar mansion, 15 Rolls-Royces and all that,” he said. “Who cares? It’s all bullshit. What was his last record like? Was it any good? That’s the question. People get hung up on the money thing. It’s nice to have four motorcycles. It’s fun. And I walk into the garage and go, ‘Holy shit! I’ve got four motorcycles!’ But I don’t go beyond a certain point.”Joel, his then-wife Elizabeth, and their dog in 1978. Photo: Dick Kraus/Newsday RM via Getty ImagesGlass housesInstead of splurging on a million-dollar mansion, Joel told Playboy that when he and his wife decided to buy a home, “We got a $300,000 house with a mortgage like everybody else.” Their glass house, featuring floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Long Island Sound, was located in the town of Oyster Bay on Long Island’s North Shore. Joel appears poised to hurl a rock at the home on the cover of his 1980 album, Glass Houses. “The old thing about people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones—I don’t believe it,” he said. “I think, Why not? Take chances. I really wanted to throw a rock at my own house.”Joel and Elizabeth at their Long Island residence. Photo: Dick Kraus/Newsday RM via Getty ImagesHome-run managementIn the 1970s, Joel asked Weber to be his manager. “The company I’m with now is New York–based,” Joel said of his representation. “It’s called Home Run—nothing to do with baseball. It’s a home-run agency.” Weber got right to work. She recalled in his HBO documentary that the “story [Joel] likes to tell” of her early days on the job is that he woke up the next morning to phones everywhere and “cabinets installed.” However, she said, “That’s not really true, but it’s close to true.” The couple (seen here at Joel’s grand piano in their living room) split time between their Manhattan apartment, where they worked, and Oyster Bay. Weber left her role managing Joel when the two split, and her brother Frank picked up where she left off. Home Run dissolved amid financial woes in the ’80s, and Joel eventually pressed charges against Frank over mishandled funds; the parties reached a settlement, the terms of which have not been disclosed publicly.The musician mixing tapes in the music studio of his New York home. Photo: Dick Kraus/Newsday RM via Getty ImagesMaking musicThe Oyster Bay house, a midcentury-modern residence, was not far from where Joel grew up in Hicksville. Photographed here in his at-home music studio in 1978, the singer’s career was on the upswing—but his relationship with Weber was growing tense. “Having a big boom in record success, I think my marriage was starting to unravel around then; 1979, it wasn’t the happiest time,” Joel once said. “Record success doesn’t translate into happiness.” Joel assumed things were paying off financially, but he admitted he “wasn’t aware” how much money he was actually bringing in. “I know we were living in a nice house, my wife was going out and buying all kinds of nice stuff,” he said. “I never really went out and did that.”Joel multitasks in his LA home studio in 1984. Photo: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty ImagesPiano manThough Joel had settled down on the East Coast, he told the Los Angeles Times that his California years cross his mind “all the time.” The singer, pictured here in LA in 1984, wrote his hit song “Piano Man” based on his experience as a lounge musician (using the name Bill Martin) at a now-defunct bar near the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue during the early 1970s. “I wonder what happened to the people I knew—the people in the bar in ‘Piano Man,’” he said. “It was the Executive Room in the Wilshire district. I got tips and made union scale, and I was able to afford an apartment in Studio City. The weather was great; the people were nice.”Joel relaxing at home in 1984. Photo: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns/Getty ImagesRocker’s retreatThough it appears Joel lived like a rock star in Los Angeles—as seen here in 1984, perched on a sheepskin-style throw over a leather sofa with a pack of Marlboros and a landline telephone by his side—he told the Los Angeles Times in 2023 that he felt more like “an exiled writer living in Paris” during his early stint in the City of Angels. “I went from being an insignificant nobody to the Piano Man while I was there,” he said. “I still look back to my time in LA with a certain amount of romance.”The singer takes a seat at home. Photo: James Leynse/Corbis via Getty ImagesKeeping the faithJoel is pictured here at the dinner table in 2001. When The New Yorker paid him a visit at his Centre Island residence in 2014, he described the interior’s aesthetic as “Catholic martyrs and saints, grotesqueries.” In the library, Joel—who decorated the place himself—had a model of the Queen Mary on his mantel, and in the living room facing the fireplace was a triptych of the Last Supper along with silver jugs and bowls on a nearby table.Joel sits near a bust-lined fireplace. Photo: James Leynse/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe entertainersJoel’s various properties have passed through some famous hands. He and his second wife, supermodel Christie Brinkley, owned a 12-acre oceanfront property in the East Hampton hamlet of Amagansett. The couple raised daughter Alexa Ray Joel in the Long Island dwelling. It was later sold to Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld for $32 million. According to The New Yorker, Joel also sold a duplex on Central Park West to singer-songwriter Sting for $5 million and a house on Martha’s Vineyard to businessman Mickey Drexler. At one point, Joel purchased a home in the Hamptons from Jaws star Roy Scheider.The singer at home in East Hampton. Photo: James Leynse/Corbis via Getty ImagesIsland life“As a little kid, I always liked boats and the romance of living on an island,” Joel told Parade in 2018. The singer—pictured here on an East Hampton dock in 2001—has always felt at home on the water. In 2007 he designed a 57-foot powerboat called the Vendetta that can go about 50 knots, per The New Yorker. Boating represented “freedom,” Joel said in his documentary. “I am the captain of my ship.”