![uptown girl billy joel genre uptown girl billy joel genre](https://img.cdandlp.com/2018/05/imgL/119162242.jpg)
![uptown girl billy joel genre uptown girl billy joel genre](https://s3.amazonaws.com/halleonard-pagepreviews/HL_DDS_9864534IIl6PXb6V.png)
![uptown girl billy joel genre uptown girl billy joel genre](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gS6e0O0dmjs/mqdefault.jpg)
In ''Famous Last Words,'' the final cut from his 1993 album, ''River of Dreams,'' he wrote: ''And these are the last words I have to say/ It's always hard to say goodbye/ But now it's time to put this book away/ Ain't that the story of my life?'' Since then, he says, he hasn't finished a song lyric. His oeuvre now includes a number of orchestral pieces and works for piano and small instrumental ensemble. Joel wrote in what has become an expanding repertory of original classical compositions. ''Soliloquy'' became one of the first pieces Mr. ''I had this terrible feeling every time my daughter would leave, ''and I started to write a four-note motif based on the words, 'We say goodbye.' The music was so evocative and expressive that I decided I didn't need words, and so I kept on writing, and it turned into a Rachmaninoffesque piano piece I called 'Soliloquy.' '' ''Divorced fathers usually don't get to spend much time with their children,'' said the stocky, ruddy-faced singer dressed in black Armani at a midtown Manhattan restaurant. He was feeling blue, he said recently, because his daughter Alexa, who is now 11, was leaving to join her mother, the model Christie Brinkley, from whom Mr. Joel sat down at the piano at his house in the Hamptons and started to write one of his saddest songs. Joel, the voluble singer-songwriter whose brash, newsy lyrics chronicled the mood swings of baby boomers for the last 25 years, suddenly gone silent? WHEN BILLY JOEL released his third volume of greatest hits last month, many of his fans were surprised that the album's three new cuts were written by other people.