I still have the ticket stub from seeing Billy Joel in concert in 1998. I was in high school and he was playing at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Though I would not say I have always been a devoted Billy Joel fan, I have begun to rediscover and enjoy his music in recent years. But here’s the thing: Billy Joel’s music is far from the best out there, in my view. Many of his songs derive their vibe from other already-well-established artists. His lyrics certainly have nuggets of truth and insight, but you’d be hard pressed to call them poetic. So how does he do it? How does Billy Joel create such a deep connection with listeners, and hold on to it for so long?
To find out, I created a data set of all his lyrics and then analyzed them to look for interesting patterns in language. I will publish more about my findings over time. For now, let’s start with some of the initial numbers:
12 studio albums (excluding greatest hits collection, special releases, singles)
104 songs
26,195 total words
2,945 unique words
But where things get really interesting is when we tally word frequencies.
Top 10 Words Across All Studio Albums
When you add up just how many times Billy Joel uses unique words per album, you see a pattern emerge right away. The words you and I are always in the Top 10 most frequently used words for every album.
Let’s unpack this a bit more.
You and I (and Billy)
When we look at the words you and I across all twelve albums in chronological order, what do we see?
One immediate pattern that I see is how correlated the two words are from the Turnstiles (1976) album to River of Dreams (1993). The word I is usually used more often, but just look at how consistently you tracks with it.
I wonder if this is part of what makes Billy Joel’s music so uniquely enchanting. By consistently addressing the second person, Billy Joel doesn’t just tell stories. He seems to be inviting listeners into his stories, staying with them as a musical guide.
And if you want greater proof that the Piano Man uniquely invites listeners into his stories with him, consider this fact. When you add up the total number of times the words you and I are used across his albums—spanning 22 years—the respective sums are almost exactly the same: the word I is used 840 times; the word you is used 837.
Methodology Note
My text analysis work follows the same basic steps, though the details of each step might change depending on the specifics of a given project. In this case, here is how I created the data visualizations you see above:
Create the data set. For Billy Joel lyrics, I went to his website where he lists all the official lyrics. I then built a web scraper using my vibe coding tool (I used Base44; you could use Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, etc.) and dumped the data into a Google Sheet.
Analyze the data. After reviewing the data and cleaning it up, I used the Gemini helper in Sheets to restructure the data and conduct some initial analyses. This is one area where advances in AI really do cut down on the preparation time for projects.
Visualize the data. With some insights now in mind, I visualized the data using Datawrapper, a free data visualization tool I find extremely stable and easy to use. For other project, I have used Flourish, though it has a bit more of a learning curve.
Write it up. Finally, I wrote up brief explanatory notes about the visualization, what I see, what it means to me, and post it here.