Elton John to Write Book About AIDS Epidemic

Elton John performs during the first night of his show "The Million Dollar Piano."

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Elton John has signed on to pen a book about his personal experiences during the global AIDS epidemic, including remembrances of friends and peers who died from complications of the disease, such as Queen star Freddie Mercury.

Proceeds of Love Is the Cure, which is expected to be released in July to coincide with an international AIDS conference in Washington, D.C., will go to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. The book will be published by Hodder and Stoughton. An audio version of the book, which will be read by John himself, will be released simultaneously.

"This is a disease that must be cured not by a miraculous vaccine, but by changing hearts and minds," John said in a statement. "Why are we not doing more? This is a question I have thought deeply about, and wish to answer – and to help change – by writing this book."

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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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