Welcome back to my third issue of A Girl and Her Charts! This week, I decided to make some fun charts about Billy Joel. I gathered lots of data, it was hard to decide what would end up in a chart. Don’t worry, I found a way to make these charts a bit more interactive so you can see more information about each data point. You’ll see what I mean, it’s very exciting!
Billy Joel has released 13 studio albums over the course of his career. Of course, he also released many live albums and compilation albums, but I did not focus on those for the purpose of this chart.
There’s lots to discuss here but first, I should point out that this chart is interactive. You can click or hover over each data point to learn more about it. So let’s look at what’s happening here. First, Fantasies & Delusions is Billy Joel’s newest album that consists entirely of piano compositions and no lyrics. It is unlike any of his other albums, which explains why it is so much longer than the others. Second, most of his albums have 9 or 10 songs on them. I charted the albums by minutes because I was curious if there was a trend in length over time. The albums sort of get longer over time, but not by any significant amount. His first four albums don’t appear to be his best, according to the data. None of them had any Grammy nominations, and the highest peak chart position among them is only 27. Things start to pick up with The Stranger, for which he earned his first Grammy nomination and win. His next six albums had a combined total of 17 Grammy nominations and three wins. The peak chart position for these albums was always in the top ten, with four of them peaking at number one. Fantasies & Delusions peaked at 83 and had no Grammy nominations, but I blame that on the unique nature of this album. There’s lots to see her, but I think I’ve said all I have to say about this one.
Now to look at singles. Billy Joel had 42 singles that charted on the Hot 100 chart. That’s quite a few! Here, I mapped them by peak chart position and number of weeks on the Hot 100.
This is an exciting chart! You can once again click or hover over a point to see more about it. Also, if you select a portion of the chart, it’ll zoom into that section. The way this chart is set up, the songs that peaked closer to number one are at the bottom. So the songs towards the bottom right did the best on the charts, and the songs at the top left did the worst (which is still good since they made it to the Hot 100). It isn’t that surprising to see such a strong trend between peak position and weeks on charts. It makes sense that a song that peaked at number one was on the charts many weeks before and after it reached that top spot. There’s not really a trend in increasing chart position over time, although we do see that his later albums such as An Innocent Man and The Nylon Curtain have songs that are concentrated towards the lower right quadrant, indicating high peak positions and many weeks on the charts. Of his 42 singles that made it on the Hot 100, 13 of them peaked in the top 10, and 23 were on there for at least 15 weeks. That’s a lot! Again, I think this is a very exciting chart, and since it’s interactive, there’s lots of fun things you can see when you spend some time looking at it.
I’ve been wanting to make a word cloud for a while, and this seemed like a good time to do it. Of course, word clouds aren’t a super great way to get an accurate understanding of word frequency. For instance, longer words appear bigger even if they occur less frequently. Still, they are good for visualization purposes.
So here is a word cloud of lyrics from every song on one of Billy Joel’s studio albums. I filtered out words like “the” and “a”. Another problem with word clouds is certain words should really be counted together but aren’t. Although “she” and “she’s” do not seem to be super frequent, their combined total of 301 should make them the 2nd biggest word here. If you can’t find “piano” on here, that’s cause it only was said 5 times (I thought it’d be more), although “uptown” was said 17 times and “life” was 73. There are probably lots of words we would expect to see that are actually pretty infrequent compared to everything else.
Well I hope you enjoyed my Billy Joel charts. Now that I’ve discovered how to make interactive charts, you can expect more of that in the future. That’s all for now!