Billy Joel never released New York State of Mind as a single. It charted for nobody, it was promoted by nobody, and the album it came from barely troubled the charts at all. Yet it became the song New York claims as its own — the one played when the city is celebrating, and, more tellingly, the one reached for when the city is grieving. It began not in a studio or at a piano, but on a bus, in the head of a homesick twenty-six-year-old who had spent three years trying to make Los Angeles feel like home and had finally admitted that it never would.
Three Years in Los Angeles
Joel had gone west with a career to build. In Los Angeles he recorded Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade, and for six months he worked under another name in a piano bar, the Executive Room, playing other people’s standards for drinkers who barely looked up. The work paid, and the city offered sunshine, movie stars and limousines — all the things the new song would politely decline. By 1975, after three years away, he was unhappy and disillusioned, and he made the decision that would define the next phase of his writing: he went home.
That homecoming runs through almost everything on his fourth album. Turnstiles is a record about crossing the country in both directions — saying goodbye to Hollywood in one song, imagining New York’s lights going out in another, and pausing, in Summer, Highland Falls, in the Hudson Valley town where Joel had settled. The album’s title itself suggests people passing through barriers, changing direction. No song on it states the change of direction more plainly than the one he wrote on the way back.
A Greyhound on the Hudson River Line
The inspiration was not a metaphor, and Joel has never pretended otherwise. He was literally taking a Greyhound bus along the Hudson River route when the idea arrived — the pride of returning home turning itself, almost unbidden, into a lyric. Some folks like to get away, the song begins, listing the holidays other people dream of: a flight to Miami Beach, a trip to Hollywood. Then comes the refusal, and the image that made the song immortal: he is taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line instead.
Joel was living at the time in a rented house in Highland Falls, up the Hudson, with his first wife, Elizabeth. In his own later telling, the words and melody started coming on the bus, and the moment he walked through the door he asked whether there was a piano in the house. Told there was one upstairs, he ran up to it and finished the song in about an hour. It had the speed of something that had been waiting. In another interview he put the writing time even shorter, and the exact minutes matter less than the feeling both versions share: this was not laboured composition. It was relief, transcribed.
Trying to Write a Standard
What Joel set out to make, deliberately, was a standard. Playing covers night after night in that Los Angeles bar had taught him how the great songs were built — how they sat easily on the piano, how they could belong to whoever sang them — and he had wanted to write one of his own ever since. Musically he reached toward Ray Charles, the singer-pianist whose blend of gospel, blues and sophistication sits behind the song’s slow, rolling piano and its unhurried confidence. The finished track runs a full six minutes, in no hurry at all.
Turnstiles was released on May 19, 1976, recorded at Ultra Sonic Studio in Hempstead, New York, with Joel producing and, crucially, playing with his own band rather than hired hands. On New York State of Mind that band gives the song its warmth: Doug Stegmeyer on bass, Liberty DeVitto on drums, and Richie Cannata on saxophone, whose solo answers Joel’s vocal like a second singer — conversational, smoky, and now inseparable from the song in listeners’ minds. Underneath it all, Ken Ascher’s understated orchestral arrangement balances piano and strings so carefully that the grandeur never smothers the intimacy. It sounds, as Joel intended, older than it is.
The Single That Never Was
And then, commercially, almost nothing happened. Turnstiles peaked at No. 122 on the Billboard 200. New York State of Mind was never issued as a single, so it had no chart run to point to, only the slow evidence of FM and New York radio play and of other musicians paying attention. The English group Mark-Almond covered it as early as 1976, folding it into a medley on their album To the Heart — a first hint that Joel had succeeded in his private ambition. A song other singers want to sing is a standard in the making, whatever the charts say.
The turning point came the following year, from Brooklyn. Barbra Streisand recorded New York State of Mind for her hit album Superman, released in June 1977, and suddenly the song had the audience its composer could not yet command on his own. Joel later named Streisand’s version a personal favourite — high praise from a writer who had once hoped Ray Charles might record it — and the covers kept coming: Carmen McRae in 1980, Shirley Bassey in 1982, Oleta Adams in 1993. Each new version loosened the song a little further from its album and sent it out into the repertoire, where standards live.
Streisand, Bennett and a Song That Changed Hands
The fullest proof arrived a quarter-century later. Tony Bennett recorded the song as a duet with Joel for his 2001 album Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues, and the pairing — the Bronx-born elder of American song and the piano man who had tried to write in his tradition — earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals at the 2002 awards, where the two men performed it live to open the ceremony. In July 2008 they sang it together again during Joel’s two concerts marking the closure of Shea Stadium. In 2014 the circle closed completely when Joel re-recorded the song as a duet with Streisand herself, for her album Partners — the singer who had carried it to the world in 1977, now sharing it with its writer.
The Night It Became Something Larger
Nothing, though, prepared the song for the autumn of 2001. Ten days after the September 11 attacks, Joel performed it for the America: A Tribute to Heroes telethon. Then, on October 20, 2001, he played it again at Madison Square Garden at The Concert for New York City, the benefit organised for members of the city’s fire and police departments and for the families of first responders killed in the attacks. In that room, in that month, a song written about one man’s homesickness stopped belonging to him at all. The Greyhound, the Hudson, the refusal to be anywhere else — it all read now as a declaration by an entire city. Joel paired it that night with Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway), his old imaginary elegy for New York, and the two songs together turned a private homecoming into a public vow.
He has been called on to make that vow again. On December 12, 2012, at 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief, again at Madison Square Garden, he sang it for a region battered by Hurricane Sandy, changing the lyric to name Breezy Point and Oceanside — places the storm had devastated — to roars from the crowd. It is now simply what the song is for. Written in an hour by a man glad to be home, never released as a single, it became the standard Joel had dreamed of writing in a Los Angeles bar — and then something he could not have dreamed of at all: the sound of New York insisting, in its worst moments, that it is still home.
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