Listen: Ben Harper Gives Away 'Rock N' Roll is Free'

Ben Harper is taking the title of his new single "Rock N' Roll Is Free" very literally by giving the track away for a limited time. The sunny, upbeat rocker is the first taste from his new album Give Till It's Gone, which will hit stores on May 17th, but for now the song is, as Harper sings, "free if you want it."

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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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