AUDIO: Jason Robert Brown Sings from Billy Joel's THE STRANGER

Composer Jason Robert Brown has built quite a catalog of his own songs, having written the music to such Broadway shows as Parade, Honeymoon in Vegas, The Bridges of Madison County, and many more, but now he is branching out into the works of the Piano Man himself. Brown recently released his own covers of songs from Billy Joel's 'The Stranger' album- check them out below! He writes on his official website:

Billy Joel's LP The Stranger was released at the end of September, 1977, and I'd guess it made its way to our house in Rockland County about two months later, presumably because my mom or dad was into "Just The Way You Are" or "She's Always A Woman." (They didn't buy many records when I was a kid; in fact, the only other one I can recall showing up around this time was Barbra Streisand's Greatest Hits Volume 2.) Which means that my life was changed some time around the beginning of 1978, although I don't remember any specific moment of discovery; at some point, I just started listening to The Stranger and never stopped.

I'm not sure it's my favorite Billy Joel album (that's probably 52nd Street) and I don't even know if it's the best collection of his songwriting (I might vote for The Nylon Curtain), but to me, it's the most elemental, definable, quintessential LP he ever released, sort of the ur-Billy. And in terms of me looking back to figure out how I turned into the songwriter I am now, I think that The Stranger - with its warring impulses of blue-collar rock versus Tin Pan Alley sophistication, art-rock ambition versus Baroque intimacy, slick and polished production versus rambunctious and ragged playing - comes closest to predicting the kind of work I ended up doing and loving.

Brown is a Tony Award-winning composer, whose "The Bridges of Madison County," a musical adapted with Marsha Norman from the bestselling novel recently closed on Broadway, directed by Bartlett Sher and starring Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale (it next heads out on tour). "Honeymoon In Vegas," based on Andrew Bergman's film, irecently closed on Broadway following a triumphant production at Paper Mill Playhouse last fall. A film version of his epochal Off-Broadway musical "The Last Five Years" was released earlier this year, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan and directed by Richard LaGravenese.

His major musicals as composer and lyricist include: "13", written with Robert Horn and Dan Elish, which began its life in Los Angeles in 2007 and opened on Broadway in 2008 (and was subsequently directed by the composer for its West End premiere in 2012); "The Last Five Years", which was cited as one of Time Magazine's 10 Best of 2001 and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics (and was subsequently directed by the composer in its record-breaking Off-Broadway run at Second Stage Theatre in 2013); "Parade," written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in 1998, and subsequently won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Musical, as well as garnering Jason the Tony Award for Original Score; and "Songs for a New World," a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, which played Off-Broadway in 1995, and has since been seen in hundreds of productions around the world.

"Parade" was also the subject of a major revival directed by Rob Ashford, first at London's Donmar Warehouse and then at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. His orchestral adaptation of E.B. White's novel "The Trumpet of the Swan" premiered at the Kennedy Center with John Lithgow and the National Symphony Orchestra, and the CD was released on PS Classics.

Future projects include a new chamber musical created with Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman called "The Connector", an untitled new piece created with Claudia Shear and Casey Nicholaw, and a new solo album for release in 2015. Jason is the winner of the 2002 Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics and the 1996 Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award for Musical Theatre. Jason's songs, including the cabaret standard "Stars and the Moon," have been performed and recorded by Audra McDonald, Billy Porter, Betty Buckley, Karen Akers, Renée Fleming, Philip Quast, Jon Hendricks and many others, and his song "Someone To Fall Back On" was featured in the Walden Media film, "Bandslam."