Billy Joel once sang “Don’t care if it’s Chinatown or on Riverside.” Now, his daughter Alexa Ray Joel is also singing about Riverside, but in a very different way.
Alexa has a new EP project called Tales from a Winding Tower, which she’s releasing one song at a time. The first song and video is “Riverside Way,” which is about shedding her good-girl skin and taking a wild ride with a bad boy.
Alexa tells ABC Audio the song was originally called “Riverside Drive,” after the Manhattan street, but she explains, “[It’s] a little awkward to sing,” so “‘Way’ just popped out.”
“It was really fun to just get in touch with that bad girl side,” Alexa adds of the song and video, which are both pretty steamy. Surprisingly, it’s Billy’s favorite on the EP.
She laughs, “He was like, ‘Where’d that one come from?’ He liked that it was such a departure.”
Other songs on the EP also find Alexa embracing her bad girl side. “It’s very much about female desire,” she says of the project. Its decidedly darker edge led Billy to compare Alexa’s EP to his own 1982 album.
“My father was saying to me, ‘Hey girl, this record’s kind of like your Nylon Curtain.’ And it kind of is,” she agrees.
Alexa says Billy, who’s been diagnosed with a condition that causes fluid buildup in the brain, is “doing great,” adding, “He is the most resilient man that I’ve ever met or will meet.” Meanwhile, she’ll pay tribute to him in March at a charity concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall celebrating his music.
“I’m not gonna not pay tribute to my legend of a father, arguably, if not the greatest songwriter ever, I put him up there with The Beatles,” she laughs, and then whispers, “I think he’s better, though.”
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