Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
Sat 5 September 2026 8:00, UK
It was fitting that Billy Joel wanted to take on the persona of a gangster because he has always been a man who walked the walk and talked the talk.
New York is forever his perfect muse in that regard, because the mean streets of the concrete jungle, as unforgiving as they can be, are also the perfect, fertile place to see every breed of life. There’s the con artists and the connoisseurs, the dramatists and the delinquents. They all exist within those finite city walls, but it’s everyone else’s job just to find them.
Back in the days when he was still in his most active period of writing songs, Joel was no different. He would look out over the bright lights of the Big Apple and wonder what places, people, and stories might be waiting for him. But thinking about it was only one thing. Actually getting out into the heart of the city was truly the best way to make things happen.
As such, there was one particular night when the pull of the streets was calling his name. “If I was writing at my studio in the Puck Building and I got stuck, I’d pace the room – it had big windows and a nice view. Sometimes I’d leave the building; I’d go down to Little Italy to get a little food, a little wine, and some espresso,” Joel later recalled.
Yet by this time, it was 1986, and the previous shine of the Piano Man was long gone. He needed something edgier, cooler, and more suave to prove that he could still cut his teeth in the business. So, whether it was a combination of the wine or just the energy that Little Italy was giving off that night, he adopted a hint of swagger, a small strut, and started on a new imagined walk of life.
Joel explained, “The walk I took on this one night was on Mulberry Street, and I just kind of invented this character that was like ‘Mr Cool’. The character is a nebbish, but in his own mind, he’s the ‘King of Mulberry Street’. When he walks by, the old ladies sitting on the stoop wave to him. It’s just one of those things I invented.”
And, if you hadn’t guessed it already, that was exactly the story of how ‘Big Man on Mulberry Street’ came to be born. What, you thought the lyrics about cruising from “Houston to Canal Street” as a “misfit and a rebel” were based on his lived experience? Well, think again. Joel may not, in fact, have been lurking around street corners, but he knew precisely how to sound like he did.
Further reading: From The Vault
To link things back to an earlier phrase, in this sense, Joel acted as both the con and the connoisseur – with a jazzy air and a smooth crooning tone, he duped people into believing that this was the kind of life he lived, even if it was just for the time that the song lasted… Yet within this, there was an unignorable power that the musician commanded, because Mulberry Street had his name written all over it.
Of course, it was testament to Joel’s power as a storyteller as much as he was a musician that songs like ‘Big Man on Mulberry Street’ lifted off the ground, mainly because he possessed the gumption and gravitas to actually inhabit them. The streets of New York were never to be the same again, not once Joel and his gangster persona had been to town.
