Listen: Brian Setzer Goes Bluegrass on 'Earl's Breakdown'

Click to listen to Brian Setzer's "Earl's Breakdown"

Brian Setzer's latest album Setzer Goes Instru-MENTAL! finds the guitarist stepping out of his usual rockabilly and big band comfort zone for an album of instrumentals including this cover of Earl Scruggs' jazz-bluegrass classic "Earl's Breakdown." The album won't be in stores until April 19th, but you can hear his rendition of that song here right now.

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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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