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Inside Billy Joel’s blended family

The 76-year-old is experiencing parenthood all over again.

Five-time Grammy winner Billy Joel is known for belting out some of the most iconic songs of the 1970s and 1980s.

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Behind-the-scenes, the ‘Piano Man’ singer has been married four times and is the father of three daughters.

Here’s everything we know about Billy Joel’s blended family:

Billy Joel’s marriage to Christie Brinkley

Billy met Sports Illustrated model Christie Brinkley in St Barts in 1983.

To try to get the model’s attention, Billy tried to get her to recognise him from one of his album covers.

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“I tried to look like me on an album cover. I gave it every angle I could,” he later explained.

When that didn’t work, Billy finally got Christie’s attention when he started playing the piano at the bar.

“The music was the key to the introduction,” he told Rolling Stone in 1986. “She sat down and started singing, too.”

Credit: Instagram.
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The couple began dating after Billy reached out to Christie to share his condolences when her ex, Olivier Chandon de Brailles, died in a car accident.

In 1985, the couple tied the knot on a 147-foot yacht on New York Habor before buying a house in Long Island.

“When you start to get famous, you need a backyard, a place where you can get away from it all,” Christie told Sports Illustrated in 1989. “I told Joe one day that the second-worst thing I could think of would be to be famous and poor because then you couldn’t escape to some island.” 

The same year they welcomed a daughter who they named Alexa Ray.

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In 1994, the couple split with People reporting the two had been separated since Thanksgiving and that Christie’s desire to move to the West Coast and Billy’s hectic touring schedule contributed to the breakdown of the marriage.

“Just because people can express themselves through their art doesn’t mean they are great communicators in person,” Christie later said, per Entertainment Weekly

Inside Billy Joel’s family life with his three daughters

Billy Joel met Alexis Roderick in a restaurant in 2009.

In 2015, they married during their annual Fourth of July party at Billy’s Long Island estate.

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Just one month later, the couple welcomed their first daughter together, who they named Della Rose. The couple’s second daughter, Remy Anne Joel, was born two years later.

Credit: Instagram.

In 2019, the music icon told Rolling Stone that he often gets mistaken for his youngest kids’ grandfather.

“I take (them) to school and one of the other parents will go, ‘Oh, your granddaughter’s so cute,’ ” he shared.

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“I still love being a dad. I didn’t know that I would be a father again at this age, but I’m glad I am,” he added. “They keep you young.”

Alexa Ray, who was named after Ray Charles, is now an accomplished singer herself.

She grew up on Long Island and had no idea her parents were famous.

Credit: Instagram.
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“My parents tried to shield me from how famous they were when I was growing up,” she told New York Magazine in 2010. “When everybody said ‘Hello, Billy! Hello, Christie!’ — I just thought they were popular.”

The now 39-year-old is a classically-trained pianist and she started composing music at a young age.

“I grew up listening to my dad write songs at the piano for hours,” she told Chorus and Verse in 2006. “I definitely believe that music is something that is in my blood, something that I was born to do.”

The singer-songwriter got engaged to her longtime partner Gleason at the start of 2018.

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“FOR ONCE in my life, I had absolutely no words, and I couldn’t speak,” she said on Instagram at the time.

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