Billy Joel by Nathan Gelgud, 2014.

When Billy Joel was a kid in Long Island, he got bullied on his way to piano lessons. His teacher also happened to be a ballet instructor, so neighboring kids would ask him where his tutu was, knock his books out of his arms, and shove him around. What did Billy do? Took boxing lessons, got good enough to fight back, and decked the next kid who teased him. He didn't have much trouble going to piano lessons after that.

Fred Schruers's new biography of Joel is chock-full of character-making anecdotes like this one. Joel grew up with a mostly absent father and a sometimes "devouring" mother, a basically normal kid who liked "good music, New York City, pretty girls, [and] Chinese food" according to a high school questionnaire. The short but successful amateur boxing career that followed his lessons gave him his slightly bulbous nose after it was broken in a match. He never graduated high school, refusing to go to summer school to earn the credits required to graduate. "I'm not going to go to Columbia University. I'm going to Columbia records." How could you not like this guy?

The book builds to a solid portrait of a likeable, practical kid from Hicksville who made good with hard work and the ability to overcome the disappointment of his first few years in the biz to become a superstar and marry Christie Brinkley. His early career of putting together scrappy bands and playing "desultory gigs" was difficult but didn't break him. Even when the botched recording of his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, made him sound like a chipmunk, he dusted himself off, dropped his management, and wrote "Piano Man," a career-defining song that's almost impossible to dislike. And he did indeed sign with Columbia.

Schruers walks us through the lyrics to "Piano Man," drawing lines from characters depicted in the song to real-life characters in Joel's life. He does the same with a few other key compositions, breaking down Joel's words to give a snapshot of the songwriter's life at the time he was writing them. In lesser books, this kind of thing gets tired fast, but Schruers does it sparingly, and only when it makes sense.

Joel, of course, would go on to perform "Piano Man" countless times for growing audiences, filling Shea Stadium, touring with Elton John, and inspiring millions of drunken party sing-alongs and passionate karaoke performances. It's gratifying to get a detailed picture of the Hicksville kid behind the monster hits, getting the scoop on the piano lessons that made the Piano Man.

Nathan Gelgud illustration inspired by Fred Schruers's biography of Billy Joel, 2014.