News Ticker: Lady Gaga, Forecastle Festival, Steve Miller Band, Herb Ellis

• A pair of old songs featuring a pre-Fame Lady Gaga will appear on an upcoming childrens' audio book titled Portal in the Park. Idolator reports the tracks, recorded with Melle Mel, accompany Cricket Casey's story about a boy who has crazy adventures after falling through a portal in Central Park.

• The Flaming Lips, Spoon and Widespread Panic are all confirmed for Louisville, Kentucky's Forecastle Festival. The ninth annual fest goes down July 9th.

• The Steve Miller Band plan to release two new albums — both sets of covers — Billboard reports. Bingo!, due this year, includes tracks by B.B. King and Jimmie Reed that Miller calls "a party record."

• Jazz guitarist Herb Ellis has died at 88 of complications from Alzheimer's disease, the AP reports. Ellis performed with the Oscar Peterson Trio and contributed standard "Detour Ahead" to the jazz canon with his Soft Winds trio.

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  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.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter