Billy Joel’s Lost 1971 Interview Returns With an AI Twist 55 Years Later
Billy Joel’s lost 1971 interview is returning in a new film that uses AI to recreate the singer at 22 using his authentic original audio.
A 22-year-old Billy Joel is appearing on screen again more than five decades later, but the man audiences will see isn’t actually Billy Joel.
A new 20-minute documentary, 1971: Billy Joel’s Lost Interview, has used artificial intelligence to visually recreate the future Piano Man at the very beginning of his career. Crucially, however, the voice audiences hear is real.
The film is built around authentic audio from a December 1971 college radio interview that was broadcast once before effectively disappearing for more than 50 years.
The Billy Joel audio is real but the video is AI
Joel was just 22 when he sat down for the interview at C.W. Post’s WCWP radio station on Long Island, shortly after releasing his debut solo album, Cold Spring Harbor.
The original interview survives on a quarter-inch reel-to-reel master recording. Director Adam Ripp has taken that authentic audio and created AI-generated visuals recreating Joel, his then-manager Irwin Mazur and interviewer Ed Mann inside the radio studio.
It means viewers will effectively be able to watch a conversation for which no original video exists.
Mann, who conducted the original interview and is an executive producer on the documentary, has said the recreation captured how Joel looked and behaved at the time. The filmmakers are presenting the technology as a way of visually bringing an important piece of music history back to life.
Billy Joel wasn’t involved in the film
There is an important distinction for fans. Joel himself was not involved in making the documentary.
That makes the project particularly interesting as AI-generated recreations of real performers become increasingly convincing.
Rather than creating fictional words for Joel, 1971: Billy Joel’s Lost Interview combines a synthetic visual recreation of the singer with his authentic voice and actual words recorded in 1971.
More than 50 years after a young Billy Joel sat down behind a microphone on Long Island, audiences are about to see a version of a moment that previously existed only as sound.
Want to see it?
The first public screening of 1971: Billy Joel’s Lost Interview takes place September 25 at the Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame in Stony Brook, New York.
Tickets are available to the public through the festival’s official website, with a live Q&A following the film.
