The Heavy: Live at Rolling Stone

Britain's hottest new retro-soul outfit the Heavy recently stopped by the Rolling Stone studio to perform stripped down, intimate takes on three songs of their latest album, The House That Dirt Built. Watch frontman Kelvin Swaby and the Heavy crew bringing the funk in these exclusive performance clips of "Sixteen," "Long Way From Home" and "Cause for Alarm."

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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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