News Ticker: Big Boi, Jonny Greenwood, Motorhead, Ke$ha

• OutKast's Big Boi has inked a solo deal with Def Jam so release his long-delayed Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty, the AP reports. Exactly one year ago, the MC told RS Jive Records was holding up the disc, which will feature "electro, funk, blues, some of everything."

• Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's Doghouse orchestral composition is currently streaming on the BBC's website.

• Slash, Dave Grohl and Lemmy Kilmister are teaming up to perform Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" at Revolver's Golden Gods Awards. The show goes down April 8th at Los Angeles' Club Nokia.

• Ke$ha has apologized to Justin Bieber over Twitter after calling the young star a "baby" earlier in the week. "u r obviouslyso talented andi would never mean to offend u.i think u r rad," she wrote.

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  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
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  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
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  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

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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