Streetlife Serenade by Billy Joel

Streetlife Serenade, Billy Joel's third album, came out on Columbia on October 11, 1974, his second for the label after Piano Man. Michael Stewart produced, and the record drifts between rock, pop rock and soft rock, the piano man keeping one foot in the lounge and the other out on the pavement.

The song from it that stuck is "The Entertainer", and a live take later landed on 12 Gardens Live in 2006. Some of the deeper cuts lived longer on stage than on vinyl: the instrumental "Root Beer Rag" was a regular in his '70s shows, the short "Souvenir" often closed the night as the final encore, and concert takes of "Streetlife Serenader" and "Los Angelenos" surfaced on Songs in the Attic in 1981. It only got to No. 35 on the album chart, but it eventually sold more than a million copies, and Turnstiles and the breakthrough of The Stranger were just around the corner.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.