Billy Joel has reportedly sold more than 160 million albums. He’s been nominated for 24 Grammy Awards (and won six of them), an Emmy, and a Tony Award (which he won). In the U.S., he’s had 33 top 40 singles and 11 top 10 albums. He’s simply one of the most popular recording artists in the history of music.

But. Critics have never been terribly kind to him, and a lot of the general public hasn’t either.

This hour, we look at the two-part, nearly five-hour HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. And we look at Billy Joel more generally and at the love/hate relationship we all seem to have had with him and his music for more than 50 years now.

GUESTS:

• Jen Allen: A pianist, composer, arranger, and educator; her new album is Possibilities
• Rebecca Castellani: Co-founder of Quiet Corner Communications and the director of marketing at Washington Montessori School
• Jack Hamilton: Slate’s pop critic and the author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
• Gene Seymour: A “writer, professional spectator, pop-culture maven, and jazz geek,” and he now writes the That Gene Seymour Substack

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Colin McEnroe and Isaac Moss contributed to this show, which originally aired August 8, 2025.

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