We’re all in the mood for these melodies.
Spotify compiled a list of the Top 10 most streamed Billy Joel songs for The Post — and the tune that took the crown pays homage to his supermodel ex.
The 1983 hit “Uptown Girl,” which Joel penned for his future wife, Christie Brinkley, landed in the No. 1 spot, according to the stats, compiled after the July 26th soundtrack album release for Joel’s new HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes.”
“I wasn’t even dating Christie when I started writing the song, I was dating Elle [Macpherson],” Joel once told Howard Stern.
“And then I started dating Christie and rather than it be about all these different girls, she became the ‘Uptown Girl.’”
The Top 10 most streamed Billy Joel songs on Spotify globally are:
- “Uptown Girl”
- “Piano Man”
- “Vienna”
- “She’s Always a Woman”
- “My Life”
- “We Didn’t Start the Fire”
- “Just the Way You Are”
- “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”
- “Only the Good Die Young”
- “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)”
In the film, Brinkley, who was married to Joel from 1985 to 1994, said she enjoyed being his muse.
“It was fun to be having this whirlwind romance and having certain aspects of that turn into music,” she gushed.
“Piano Man,” in second place, was the six-time Grammy winner’s first hit, released in 1973.
It was inspired by characters Joel met at The Executive Room, the bar where he played when he and his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, moved to Los Angeles after his first record “Cold Spring Harbor” flopped.
Weber, who worked at the bar as well, was the one Joel refers to in the lyric “the waitress is practicing politics” — and she told The Post how her now-famous serving gig came about.
“Bill didn’t drive and when he went to work, I drove him and waited around to drive him home. John at the bar convinced me to be a cocktail waitress even though I had no experience,” she recalled.
“He knew we had little money and figured if I had to be there while Bill was working, I could make some money too.”
The piano man, 76, who has been married four times, admitted that many of his hits were about Weber.
“They say ‘Write what you know,’ so I wrote what I knew. A lot of the songs were based on Elizabeth,” Joel, a Bronx native who grew up on Long Island, said in the film.
Two of the songs on the Top 10 list — “She’s Always a Woman” and “Just the Way You Are” — are based on Weber.
“Oh, I couldn’t answer how many songs are about me,” she said. “We were just living our lives together and we never spoke of it.”
The 1977 song “Vienna,” which Joel wrote about visiting his father — who abandoned him when he was 8 — in the Austrian city in his 20s, came in third place.
Joel has sold over 150 million records in his career — making him one of the most popular recording artists on the planet — and it’s not hard to understand why his songs still resonate, Weber said.
“The human condition has not changed since time began. We all fall in love, experience pain, sorrow and joy,” she said.
