If said "Piano Man" is legendary musician Billy Joel, he's playing electric guitar while a roadie named "Chainsaw" screams out a rowdy version of the 1979 AC/DC rock song.

It says a lot about Billy Joel - Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and Songwriter Hall of Famer, the sixth best-selling artist in the United States - that he can cede the spotlight to a husky, sweaty member of his tech crew smack in the middle of a solo concert. And then take it back again seamlessly.

Self-deprecation was just a part of the slick routine at the EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City Thursday night. During the more-than-two- hour concert, Joel joked about his disappearing hair, his age (I'm actually Billy's dad. ...Billy wasn't able to make it here tonight, so he sent me,") his much-publicized car accidents ("I have ridiculous car insurance,") .

Sure, he's used the same jokes in other venues, but you'd expect a guy who has sold more than 80 million records and spent the better part of a decade touring with fellow piano legend Elton John to have the performing thing nailed down.

There was no opening act to kick off the evening, just Joel belting out "Prelude/Angry Young Man," off his 1976 album "Turnstiles. " The concert featured a mix of obscure tracks off old albums, fan favorites and intermittent Christmas carols on the piano.

Billy Joel's "Christmas In Fallujah," only the second song he has completed since switching his focus from pop music to other types of composition in 1993 after the "River of Dreams" album, hit iTunes this morning and, well, it's OK.

There are plenty of reasons that make the song hard to criticize. It's sung by Cass Dillon, a Long Island newcomer, not Joel. Proceeds from the single go to "Homes For Our Troops," a nonprofit that builds specially adapted homes for service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with severe disabilities. And its message about supporting our troops, especially during the holidays, is an important one.

Joel said he wrote "Christmas In Fallujah" earlier in this year after receiving letters from men and women serving in Iraq saying how they had found inspiration and comfort in his songs. However, he didn't think he was the right person to sing the song. "I thought it should be somebody young, about a soldier's age," Joel said in a statement. "I wanted to help somebody else's career. I've had plenty of hits. I've had plenty of airplay. I've had my time in the sun. I think it's time for somebody else, maybe, to benefit from my own experience."

That said, it's no "Goodnight Saigon" and, as unfair as it may be, any pop song Joel releases these days will be compared with his previous work – even if he isn't the one singing it. Lyrically, "Christmas In Fallujah" captures despondency and frustration well, though that doesn't exactly make it inspirational. Musically, it owes more to latter-day Nirvana than a classic Joel rocker.

For Dillon, the association with Joel should land more attention for his "A Good Thing Never Dies" EP, though his songs "Sliding" and "Lack of Game" probably offer better examples of what the promising 21 year-old singer/songwriter can do.

Billy Joel has re-entered the pop music marketplace with a new song. But Billy Joel isn't singing it.

Enter Cass Dillon, a 21 year-old from Rockville Centre, whose recording of Joel's "Christmas In Fallujah" - a kind of echo of Joel's Vietnam epic from 25 years ago, "Goodnight Saigon" - debuted yesterday on Apple's iTunes online store.

Nearly 10 years after he "retired" from touring, pop singer-songwriter Billy Joel was back in Dallas on Tuesday night, a little balder, a little grayer, a little grittier, but still the wonderfully entertaining and wildly encyclopedic performer he has always been.

The Long Island-born singer quit touring after a 1999 tour to focus on writing classical music. One poorly received classical album materialized.

Then, two years ago, Joel played a string of 12 sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. Those led to sporadic dates across the country, and now Joel's back on the road again.

Sort of.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer's latest single, "Christmas In Fallujah," premiered Tuesday on iTunes December 4th, 2007.

But not only is the track pianoless, it's also devoid of Joel's vocals. Instead, the pop legend has passed singing duties to Cass Dillon, a 21 year-old upstart singer/songwriter from his native Long Island.

On his web-site, Joel said the song was inspired by letters he received from soldiers who have taken solace in his tunes during their tours in the war-torn country. He combined their sentiments with his own impressions of the battle.

Billy Joel has released a new pop single, the anti-war "Christmas In Fallujah." Just don't expect to hear his voice on it.

Billy Joel gave his newest song, "Christmas In Fallujah," to 21 year-old Cass Dillon.

At 58, Joel felt he was too old to sing the song, which was inspired by letters the "Piano Man" received from soldiers in Iraq. So he gave it to Cass Dillon, a 21 year-old singer/songwriter from Long Island.

Question: What inspired you to write "Christmas In Fallujah?"

Answer: I guess just the cumulative effect of this war. We've been there longer than World War II. I've been getting mail from service people over there, and with the holidays coming on made this thing just popped out.

Question: Was there a certain letter that sparked it and made you sit down and start writing?

Answer: It was a couple of letters. There seemed to be a similar theme running through the letters, which was a sense of alienation from the home front. I think that a lot of people are starting to feel like they're forgotten.

Question: How long ago did you write the song, and where were you when you wrote it?

Answer: I wrote this back in September. I was at home in Long Island and I knew as soon as I wrote it that I wasn't the person to sing it. Not that I'm trying to distance myself from what I wrote, but I didn't think my voice was the right voice. I thought it should be somebody around the age of the people who were serving over there.

Question: How did you find Cass Dillon, who sings on the track?

Answer: Cass has been doing an album project with my guitar player, Tommy Byrnes. Tommy's been producing his recordings, he brought him to my attention about a year ago. When I finished this song, I spoke with Tommy. I said, "What happened to that guy whose stuff you played me a year ago?" And he said, "Well, he's coming out with his own album." I said, "Do you think he might like doing this song?" And ran it by Cass, he loved the song, he said he wanted to do it. We went into the studio on Veteran's Day, of all days. So it was an interesting zeitgeist there.

Question: Do you think it's fair to call it a protest song or an anti-war song?

Answer: I think it's a song about a soldier, about a marine. People can take it anyway they want. I don't get up on a soapbox and do political messages. I believe in talking about the human being, and the conditions humans find themselves in.

Question: Were topical songs something you avoided during your career?

Answer: I never liked when a rockstar got up on stage and told people how to vote. I find it insulting. But I believe if an artist feels strongly about something, it should be reflected in their art. Ultimately, everything's political. Even love is political.

Question: This is the second song you have written in the past year. What caused you to start writing again?

Answer: Well, the other song you are referring to was really just written as a gift from me to my wife. I had no intention of releasing that as a recording. I always thought that would be done by a singer like Tony Bennett. I actually thought of Tony when I was writing it. It was more of a mental exercise. "I wonder if I can write a song that Tony Bennett would sing?" Tony actually likes the song, or that's what he told me, but he hasn't recorded it yet. That is how I thought something like that would come out. I really had no plans to release that, but Columbia knew that I did the recording as a gift to my wife and they wanted to put it out. I was like, "Well, you're the record company, you can do what you want."

I wanted to get "Christmas In Fallujah" recorded while it was still new. I don't like a song to sit around for a long time. It starts to get moth eaten, which is why it all came together so quickly. Other than that, I have really been writing songs. I have said this many times, but I have no intention of stopping myself from writing songs. I just haven't felt the motivation to write that kind of music. I am much more interested in instrumental music these days. I have no plans of having those recorded either. I am pretty much just doing it for my own edification and mental exercise really.

Question: Your last pop album was a pretty big success, so why did you stop?

Answer: When you are in the pop music business and you are a rock star, there is always pressure to deliver more product, as they say. "When am I going to get that Billy Joel feeling?" I kind of wanted to get off the damn treadmill, because you are only as good as your next hit. You can have a big hit and then a couple of months go by and "Oh, he's washed up." I always rejected that concept. I finished the album with a song called "Famous Last Words." These are the last word I have to say. I kind of knew I was at the end of a particular point in my life, a particular chapter in that book, and I wanted to put an epilogue on it.

Question: You're still touring. Do you find that fulfilling?

Answer: I love to play. That is how I started out, before I was writing and before I was a rock star I was in bands. That is the real kick. It seems like history has gone back to that anyway. People played. Then someone invented the phonograph, then they started making recordings of the performances and that kind of took over. Recording artists became state-of-the- art, instead of just performances. Now with the industry and the deep doo doo it is in now, it has all kind of gone back to the live performance, because you can't replace that. That's where I started, and that is kind of what I enjoy - the synergy between musicians on stages. We haven't toured on our own in awhile. We were on tour with Elton for close to ten years. We were playing a lot of greatest hits stuff. That was fun for a while, but then it became kind of wrote rote and we wanted to see what it was like to tour on our own again and play our own set list of songs and album tracks, obscurities. Can we still do this on our own? And so far, the response has been really good. People still want to see us.

Question: I was looking at the set-list from your first 2006 show, where you opened with "Piano Man," and played "Laura," and "Zanzibar," and "Famous Last Words," and all these rarities. By the next show you dropped some of those songs. What happened?

Answer: Well, we wanted to try something different. We wanted to see how it would work if we did the set backward, if we did a lot of obscurities, and the show was a real stinker. A lot of people went to the bathroom. A lot of people were disappointed. We didn't get the response that we normally get if we balance the show another way. People pay a ton of money for tickets now. We kept our tickets under a hundred bucks, trying not to squeeze out younger people. We want younger people to come to the shows, and they can't afford that much. You have to keep that in mind when you are on stage. They are here to hear stuff they are familiar with, as well as the stuff we want to be self-indulgent with. There is a balance you have to strike, and that is just experience from the road.

Question: Do you think you will just keep touring? Do you see a point where you will just want to stop?

Answer: No, I will stop. I am not going to say that it is going to be tomorrow. I don't want to make one of those grand retirement speeches. People thought I said I was going to stop doing it all together, but I never said I was going to stop being a musician. I just said I wasn't going to tour as much. I probably won't be writing a lot of songs in the near future. I probably won't be recording as much. I am 58 years-old and I see pictures of myself and am like "Oh God, you never looked like a rock star, but now you look like a rock star's grandfather. " There is a physicality to it. Once you get to a certain age, you just aren't going to be able to do it, grandpa. Although, the Stones seem to be pushing the envelope.

I just saw Chuck Berry a few weeks ago, and he's still going.

Guys like that from the old school don't even think about retiring. They are probably going to play until they kick. I just feel like I am going to wear out whatever welcome I am getting. I just feel like I'm going to potentially wear out whatever welcome I'm getting. You know, once I hit 60 I'm going to have to sit down and do some hard thinking...is this what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life?

Question: Are you playing Shea stadium?

Answer: We're talking with the the Mets organization. Nothing has been locked in yet. I don't know how the word got out, but nothing has been really confirmed as far as I know. I would love to play there though.

Question: I've noticed that Liberty DeVitto is no longer playing drums in your band?

Answer: Well actually, I haven't worked with him since the last tour we did, which started in 2005.

Question: Why?

Answer: Let's put it this way...he knows why and I know why, and I'm going to leave it at that.

Interviewer: Fair enough; I'm not going to push that point.

Answer: That's OK, I get asked that a lot, but it was a personal situation and I'm not really going to talk about that.

Question: Do you think its possible that at some point in the future you'll write a new album?

Answer: Yeah, it's a possibility. I never discount the possibility of it, but I don't want to appear to be a tease and go, oh yeah, maybe I will. I honestly don't know. I really don't know. I am kind of a compulsive writer. I write in streaks and then there are periods of time where I don't write at all. Although I am writing music all the time, not necessarily songs, so, I honestly don't know. People who are looking for a definitive answer from me, I'm sorry, I have no idea. If I get motivated and write a whole album of songs, I'm not going to stop myself.

The "Piano Man" is joining the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Billy Joel, whose songs have been a slice of Americana for the last 30 years, will perform with the venerable orchestra January 26th, 2008 to celebrate the 151st anniversary of the Academy of Music.

The program, led by music director Christoph Eschenbach, will feature selections from Joel's pop repertoire, as well as classical and avant garde selections.

Joel and Eschenbach will be joined by Blue Man Group, whose work can best be described as eclectic, as well as soprano Disella Larusdottir, pianist Conrad Tao and host Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball."

This will be Joel's first appearance with a major orchestra. The annual Academy of Music Concert and gala that follows...at the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue hotel this year...are among the institution' s most successful fundraisers, assisting with the upkeep and preservation of the Academy of Music, a National Historic Landmark.

Billy Joel has a rock and roll soul and a classical heart. He began taking piano lessons at age 4 after his parents noticed his fondness for Schubert's romantic melodies. He borrowed a melody in his song ''This Night'' from Beethoven's ''Pathetique'' sonata. He siphoned Aaron Copland's Western zest in ''The Ballad of Billy The Kid,'' his orchestrated rock rodeo of 19th and 20th Century bandits.

In 2001, Joel completed an eight-year experiment by releasing ''Fantasies & Delusions,'' a CD of his solo classical pieces steeped in Chopin, Debussy and Rachmaninoff. It was recorded by Richard Joo, who has better classical chops than Joel, in Mozart Hall in Vienna, the hometown of Joel's half-brother, who is a symphonic conductor.

On Saturday night, Joel will receive his classical diploma during the 151st anniversary concert and ball at the Academy of Music, Philadelphia's most hallowed hall. First the Philadelphia Orchestra, the academy's former tenant and current owner, will perform a new orchestration of his ''Waltz No. 2 (Steinway Hall),'' which premiered on ''Fantasies & Delusions.'' Then he'll perform arrangements of his songs, including '''Nylon Curtain' Suite'' and '''Uptown Girl' Variations,'' with his band and the orchestra. It will be his first live gig with a major orchestra in a five-decade career.

The 58 year-old will enhance his reputation as a philanthropist by jump-starting the orchestra's Billy Joel Endowment Fund for Education. After decades of raising money for everything from the Amazon rain forest to bay men on his native Long Island, he's recently become a major musical humanitarian. In 2005 he gave six-figure donations to seven Eastern music institutions. Last month his new song, ''Christmas In Fallujah,'' began funding Homes for Our Troops, which helps customize residences for wounded soldiers.

The performance will take place in a city that's showered Joel with brotherly love. In 1972 he became a minor celebrity after WMMR-FM, the Philadelphia rock radio station, recorded and released a live version of ''Captain Jack,'' his gritty saga of suburban angst. Kept in rotation for a year and a half, the recording led him to sign with Columbia Records, the powerhouse label for Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel. Adopted as a hometown hero, Joel's popularity is memorialized in a Wachovia Center banner marking his 46 Philly sell-outs.

Joel, a crossover musician, will share a crossover bill on Saturday, 151 years to the day of the academy's very first performance. The orchestra will perform an etude for PVC pipes with Blue Man Group, three mute, kinetic, inventively percussive men in blue make-up. Former caterers Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink spray spectators with everything from food to paint and satirize everything from information overload to egotistical rock stars.

Soprano Disella Larusdottir will sing Donizetti and Puccini arias. The Iceland native won the vocal award in the orchestra's 2007 Greenfield Competition for greater Philadelphia students. Past honorees include pianist Andre Watts and violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.

Conrad Tao, a 13 year-old pianist, will excerpt Rachmaninoff's ''Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini.'' In 2006 he wowed Lehigh Valley listeners by soloing on Mozart piano and violin concertos with the Pennsylvania Sinfonia Orchestra, then encoring with one of his own works.

The gala is a keyboard bonanza. Joel wrote ''Baby Grand'' as a duet for himself and fellow pianist Ray Charles. Christoph Eschenbach, the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director, debuted with the ensemble in 1973 as a pianist. Blue Man Group's battery of percussion instruments includes a stripped piano placed on its side, tuned to one note and hammered on the strings by a large soft mallet.

Saturday's event has two primary purposes, according to academy president Joanna McNeil Lewis, who grew up on the Philadelphia Orchestra's famous children's concerts. Proceeds will help restore and preserve the academy building, including its 5,000-pound chandelier, by itself a $1.4 million project. The National Historic Landmark and America's oldest continuously used opera house has outdoor gas lamps, an interior modeled after that of La Scala in Milan and a fabled musical legacy. This is where the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the first American performance of Gounod's ''Faust,'' where Gustav Mahler conducted his eighth symphony with more than 1,000 performers, where Frank Sinatra entertained World War II soldiers in a basement canteen.

The concert/ball will also raise the academy's profile as an all-purpose cultural center. For 151 years, it has presented ballets and Broadway musicals, reunions of Civil War generals and Supreme Court justices, high-school graduations and technological commencements. In 1877 Alexander Graham Bell transmitted live music from New York to Philadelphia to demonstrate the revolutionary telephone.

The academy's public-relations campaign began in earnest last year, when it switched the gala from a primarily classical program to more of a variety show. The Philadelphia Orchestra honored Leopold Stokowski, its legendary music director from 1912 to 1940, by accompanying the Disney movie ''Fantasia,'' which he helped create, conduct and orchestrate. Offscreen Eschenbach mimicked shaking hands with Mickey Mouse, which ''Stokie'' did onscreen.

As Lewis points out, last year's gala revived the splashy spirit of the first gala. That 1957 event featured performances by three musical hall of famers: pianist Artur Rubinstein, violinist Isaac Stern and singer Dinah Shore. Eugene Ormandy, the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director, shared conducting chores with Danny Kaye, an appropriate assignment for a comic actor who played Walter Mitty, James Thurber's dramatic dreamer.

This year's edition is designed to please more generations. Joel unites young and old through his songs ''Just The Way You Are,'' a wedding favorite for its lovely melody and feisty message, and ''We Didn't Start The Fire,'' a classroom favorite for its catchy summary of 20th-century history. Tao and Larusdottir represent the up-and-coming musicians whose careers Joel is financing and the Philadelphia Orchestra is grooming.

Even the oddest act doesn't seem so odd. Blue Man Group, after all, is equally an avant-garde and family act. Blue men who act like resident aliens aren't that weird, says Lewis, in a building that once hosted an indoor football game on a wooden field.

The event will also mark the launch of the Philadelphia Orchestra's Billy Joel Endowment Fund for Education, which will be dedicated to improving classical music education in the Philadelphia area.

Billy Joel has been a supporter of Homes for Our Troops for several years. Around Christmas, Billy Joel sent his annual donation on behalf of close friends to the national non-profit organization that provides specially adapted homes for our severely injured troops. This year, the donation was substantially larger.

Lots of listeners no doubt attend the Academy of Music's anniversary concerts because they love the old hall and because they love the Philadelphia Orchestra in it.

In recent years, though, the gala concert has become less old-society-centric and more of an event whose tickets go in blocks to corporations sponsoring the event. Audiences may marvel at the Academy's elegance, as last night's white-tie and gowned crowd no doubt did at the 51st iteration of the event.

But orchestral music? For many younger attendees, it's like crashing a party and finding everyone else is speaking a different language.

So last night Billy Joel was brought in to translate. Even if the pop-music figure reached his musical apex in the 1970s, this crowd seemed happy to relive its high school and college soundtrack. The Academy's aim of involving a younger crowd in the 151-year-old building's future seems to have worked, at least for a night.

You needed no further proof than the 16 measures Joel turned over to the audience in a fast waltz called "Piano Man." The audience knew every word.

This pop-infused follow-up to last year's anniversary fete (whose celebrity gilding was provided by Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, and Rod Stewart) was unusually lucrative. The event and the fund-raising season leading up to it grossed $5.4 million, including Joel's donation of his fee to establish a music