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Don't make music for some vast, unseen audience or market or ratings share or even for something as tangible as money. Though it's crucial to make a living, that shouldn't be your inspiration. Do it for yourself.

Billy Joel

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Billy Joel
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: May 9
Composer
Musician
Pianist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
New York City
New York
William Martin Joel
William Martin Billy Joel
BJ
William M. Joel
Even
Market
Something
Inspiration
Ratings
Make
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Audience
Tangible
Though
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Money
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Shouldn

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I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.
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Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania.
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I was thinking of the Four Seasons, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and when I was thinking Uptown Girl! I was trying to sing like Frankie Valli. They had a song called Ragdoll, which was about a poor girl and a rich guy. So I just flipped it around and made it about a rich girl and a poor guy.
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I hope it does not take the rest of my life until I find what it is I've been looking for.
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Let me go on sleeping and I will lose myself in palaces of sand, and all the fantasies that I've been keeping will make the empty hours easier to stand.
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You're having a hard time and lately you don't feel so good You're getting a bad reputation in your neighborhood. It's alright, it's alright Sometimes that's what it takes. You're only human, you're allowed to make your share of mistakes.
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If it seems like I've been lost in 'lets remember', If it seems I'm gettin' older and missin' my younger days, well you shoulda known me much better, cause the past is something that never got in my way.
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Know what you love and do what you love. If you don't do what you love, you're just wasting your time.
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You can speak your mind But not on my time.
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Do what's good for you Or you're not good for anybody
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If you search for truthfulness, you might as well be blind.
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I have been both praised and criticized. The criticism stung, but the praise sometimes bothered me even more. To have received such praise and honors has always been puzzling to me.
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What will it take for you to believe in me, the way that I believe in you?
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The graduations hang on the wall, but they never really helped us at all.
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Forced to recognize our inhumanity, our reason coexists with our insanity. And though we choose between reality and madness, it's either sadness or euphoria.
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It's nine o'clock on a Saturday, the regular crowd shuffles in / There's an old man sitting next to me making love to his tonic and gin / He says, 'Son, can you play me a memory?/ I'm not really sure how it goes / But it's sad and it's sweet, and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man's clothes.'
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Following a code of silence, you're never gonna lose the anger.
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I started just concentrating on songwriting when I was abut 20 I'd been in rock bands six or seven years, kinda got that out of my system, I said, ok, you ain't gonna be a rock star, you don't look like a rock star, it probably ain't gonna happen. So what you should do is write songs and maybe other people will do your songs.
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Give a moment or two to the angry young man with his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand.
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I actually wrote the song first as well, it's 9 o'clock on a Saturday. That bit. Then I said, You know what? It needs some kind of an introduction to kind of set the mood and set the flavor. So I just played this kind of cocktail lounge thing, the hustle and bustle of waitresses going by - that kind of thing.
Billy Joel