Jesse McCartney Celebrates New LP, Future David Cook Collabo

Jesse McCartney is known for being a child actor, pop dreamboat and consistently the most celebrated person at the Kids Choice Awards. But he's also half the brains behind last year's highest-grossing song in the U.K., Leona Lewis' sultry ballad "Bleeding Love," and the owner of two Number One singles, a platinum record and a rack of Radio Disney trophies that would make Miley Cyrus jealous. Not bad for a dude who started out balancing soap opera roles with a tap-dancing boy band (Wiki search: Dream Street. Hilarious.) Rock Daily stopped by McCartney's release party for Departure at New York's Marquee last night and learned McCartney has good reason to be psyched that David Cook won American Idol. "Ryan [Tedder of OneRepublic] and I are planning to write some songs with him for his album," he said. So does he have any regrets about giving "Bleeding Love" (which he also penned with Tedder) away? "No, no," he said. "I'm so happy for Leona. She deserves it. There are really no bad feelings."

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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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