Duffy Burns Through the Blues During Lollapalooza Afternoon

The heat was definitely getting to Duffy. Midway through the Welsh songstress' Friday afternoon set at Lollapalooza, she had to dab her melting makeup with a towel. "I'm not used to this heat, Chicago," she said. But she didn't let what she called "Welsh melodrama" get in the way of a groovy performance that seemed to have a cooling effect on the crowd. Dressed in a sexy sailor outfit, Duffy wrapped her soulful, feathery voice around blues-soaked tunes like "Syrup and Honey." She even dropped in a rocksteady cover of Solomon Burke's "Cry to Me." "I don't normally do covers, but it's a festival, so fuck it," she joked. It was an excellent attitude to adopt as a way to kick off a long and rocking weekend.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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