The Biggest Revelations in HBO’s Billy Joel Documentary

Billy Joel, 76, who has 33 best successes and five Grammy Awards, has had an expansive and exciting life, which is concentrated in a new documentary, And it’s okay.

Directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, HBO Doc in two parts will put viewers in a state of mind by Billy Joel. Appointed according to the favorite of his songs from Joel, he presents all the greatest successes of the natives of Long Island – more than 110 of the 121 songs in his catalog – and highlights the songs that have catapulted him to new peaks in his career like “Just The Way You Are”, “Piano Man”, “Captain Jack” and “We Doft the Fire”.

In addition to many family photos and home videos, viewers will see the rocker seated for interviews in his home piano and will repeat his Madison Square Garden residence. There are images never seen by Joel playing “Piano Man” in Columbia Records the day he signed with the label. Her four women, her daughter Alexa, and his half-brother Alex, a conductor, share family stories, while entertainment leaders and musicians like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen and P! NK talk about Joel’s impact on rock ‘n’ roll.

“He didn’t really see the film until it was over, and we are really proud of it,” said Lacy. “It is a film made independently.”

Here is an overview of the most notable moments of And that’s fine.

Women who inspired Billy Joel

Billy Joel’s three ex-wives sit for interviews in this Doc series, and they speak strongly about their relations with him.

And it’s okay Present the first interview in 40 years with Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth Weber, a first muse, who helped launch her career by choosing “Just The Way You Are” for one of her first albums The foreigner. He then won two Grammy Awards, and Paul McCartney said in the series that he always wanted to have written this song. She worked as a manager until they separated in 1982, the same year he survived a motorcycle accident that highlighted his reckless behavior and her alcohol consumption.

“I love Bill, I will always do it,” she said. “We were together more than the sum of the parts, and I’m really proud of it.”

His second wife, the model Christie Brinkley, made her clip for “Uptown Girl” a success, while she was sashaly through a service station while Joel, disguised as a service station stadium, continued her. “It was fun to have a swirling romance and certain aspects of this transformation into music,” she says. They were one of the biggest celebrities couples in their time and were known for hitting dramatic poses for paparazzi. They had a daughter, Alexa Joel – who is also a singer – but Brinkley says that Joel became difficult to live because he did not remember the things he had done while he was drinking.

His third wife, Katie Lee Biegel, a 23 -year -old chief whom he married in 2004, led him to go to a Betty Ford rehabilitation program after giving him an ultimatum. In the doc, she says that their age difference ended up making them incompatible. She wanted to go to all the games to which Joel was invited, and Joel wanted to stay at home. “I wanted to do all things together, but I guess that is where our age came into play,” she said. “I also think that there was always a little resentment that I had pushed him to go to Betty Ford.”

Joel is married to Alexis Roderick, who worked at Morgan Stanley since 2015. He was in retirement mode when they met, cooking Teriyaki salmon for her when she came back from work. In the doc, he talks about playing the piano for Alexis as his way of courting her, but she seemed not impressed, and it was relieved that she was interested in him as a person against him as a interpreter. They have two young children. “After years of learning and personal growth, my children have the most astonishing version of him,” said Alexis.

“He has a story of very strong women in his life,” explains Levin, citing the fact that he was raised by a single mother and chose two women to direct And it’s okay.

The search for Billy Joel for his father

Throughout the Doc series And it’s okay, Joel talks about all the time he spent trying to find his father, Howard Joel, who released his family in the 1950s.

He found his father in Vienna in the early 1970s, when Joel had their twenties. There he also got to know his half-brother Alex, a classical music composer, who appears in And that’s fine. Howard Joel even joined Billy Joel on stage during a concert in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1995.

However, his father remained away and distant. “We have never really established a solid link,” says Billy Joel And that’s fine. He describes his father as “the missing link” of his life. And yet, he forgave his father not to be present in his life. When he died in 2011, he “sort of panicked”, thinking: “He left, and I never knew him. I had no animosity towards him. ”

As Alexa Joel explains: “It broke his heart a bit that his father did not come to him – he had to go to Vienna. He was always looking for this deeper connection. ” However, she says he found it through her brother Alex who is a conductor.

In 2001, he recorded a classic album with pianist Hyung-Koo as a way to pay tribute to his father’s love for classical music. As the commentator says, Howard Stern, And it’s okay, “I think his journey has just wanted to know his father through music.”

Given his distant relationship with his own father, he promised to be a more involved father with the two young girls he has via Alexis Roderick Joel. He does not focus on writing and recording at this stage of life, but on the best father he can be. As he says, “These are things I missed. I want to make sure they don’t miss it. ”

“Even for people who know the songs and sing, they will say to themselves:” Oh, okay. Now I know where Billy was in his life at that time, and why he wrote this song, “says Levin.

While Joel describes his approach to the writing of songs, “I do not dwell on a lot of metaphor and comparison. I write as I speak.”

He wrote sending from the music industry. He wrote “Piano Man” while he was trying to join the two ends and play the piano in a bar called Executive Lounge in Los Angeles, and “The Entertainer” was even more meta, to publish “Piano Man” and “Kvetching of Awing A Hit Record in the Music Business”, as Joel said.

Many Joel songs are autobiographical. “Vienne” is inspired by his trip to meet his father in Vienna, Austria. “The New York State of mind” is inspired by the red and gold trees that he saw during a bus trip en route to a rental house in the Hudson valley. Fortunately, there was a piano in the house, and he said that he “ran upstairs on the piano, wrote this song probably in about an hour. He just came out. ”

Some of his most famous songs aim to be on the head on love heels.

“She’s Got A Way” concerns her love for his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, and “The Longst Time” is to go out with Christie Brinkley, while the song that the name is named, “and So It Goes”, concerns the relationships that end.

“True love does not always float on clouds and ecstasy. It is a large part of the pain,” he said in the series. “He has a raised note in almost all agreements … It’s a bit like the end of a romance, no resolution, which is terrifying to consider. That is why I wrote it.”

He wrote “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)” for his daughter, Alexa, so she knew he would still be there for her. It is soft-love for Alexa, who is moved that her father loved him so much to write a song about her, but he was also written at a time when his alcohol consumption was out of control, and her marriage to her mother, Christie Brinkley, disintegrated.

“If there was a skeleton key to unlock what is behind the songs, it would probably be my relations with the others,” explains Joel. “Everything I write is influenced by someone else.”

A little trivia of directors who does not appear in the doc: “We did not start fire”, which shakes the names of the information manufacturers, was inspired by a conversation that Joel had with the son of John Lennon, Sean Lennon. As Lacy explains: “Sean said:” Yes, yes, you are so lucky that nothing had happened in your life. Look at all the things we have to face. “And Billy was like,” do you laugh at me? “”

These days, Joel has a mansion in Florida, where he lives with his wife Alexis Roderick and their two young girls. He likes to take out his boat Alexa, named after his first daughter. Pleasure navigation is a “freedom”, he says, because “you have left the earth and you are alone. You browse, you control where you are going – so you should always be in control, and there is something exhilarating about it. I am in control. I am very powerful.

In May 2025, the New York Times said he had canceled all his upcoming concerts after receiving a diagnosis of a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus, which affects his hearing, vision and balance. He is currently recovering from an operation and pauses in performance.

“He has never forgotten where he comes from, and I think that is why people relate to him,” says Lacy. “He has not forgotten that he comes from Hicksville, grew up in Levittown in a Hardscrabble life, and it was a long slow trip to the top for him.”

Now he had more time to think about his career, and And it’s okay is a product of this.

“I think music saved my life,” says Joel in the doc. “It gave me a reason to live.” Alexa said that her father would always say to him: “If you do what you like, then you will like what you do. It is really the secret of life. I think, for him, through all the sadness and all the difficulties he has experienced, he always did what he loved and that is really what made him advance, kept the music to come.”

Joel recognizes that he has his faults And it’s okay, Explaining: “I made a lot of mistakes in my life. I grew up from them. I learned from them. ”