Apparently
William Joel didn’t feel confident in his ability to write a full three- or four-movement piano sonata. I don’t blame him. He didn’t spend his musical apprenticeship at Yale, Indiana or Julliard, but went straight from Hicksville to the beer-soaked piano bars of Long Island. He had a long, hard road before he got a hit with “Piano Man” in 1973, whose single release was butchered by Columbia when they abridged the song for AM radio broadcast. Joel didn’t attempt to work with the interrelationships of multiple movements in a sonata form but instead wrote a simple suite for piano. Unfortunately, Joel’s Suite for Piano only has the final movement available on YouTube. There is a lot of Satie and other composers here.
Joel: Suite for Piano (“Star-Crossed”), third movement (“Delusion”)
Some of these pieces are showing up in piano recitals, and I’m personally glad to see him being taken seriously. I’m waiting for professional classical pianists to program Joel as encores.