Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings will release Turnstiles: 50th Anniversary Edition on December 11, a four-CD and Blu-ray box built around the 1976 album Billy Joel made when he gave up on Los Angeles and moved home to New York. The set holds 67 audio tracks, 54 of them never released in any form, plus 32 video performances and a concert film that has been effectively unseen for nearly five decades. Anniversary boxes come along for a lot of albums. This one lands differently for anyone who lives here, because Turnstiles is the most Long Island record Billy Joel ever made: written by a Hicksville kid on his way back east, recorded in Hempstead, and played by a band he found on the Island.

The album that brought him home

By 1975 Joel had spent years in Los Angeles, long enough to write Piano Man and to conclude the place was not his. Turnstiles, released on May 19, 1976, is the sound of the move home, and it says so right down the track list: Say Goodbye to Hollywood on the way out, New York State of Mind on the way in. Summer, Highland Falls and I've Loved These Days came out of the same stretch of writing, and Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) imagined the city's destruction so vividly that it became part of New York's real history 25 years later, when Joel played it at the Concert for New York City after September 11.

The album itself was committed to tape at Ultrasonic Recording Studios in Hempstead, the same room WLIR used for its live radio sessions in those years, with Joel producing the record himself. No other album in his catalog was made this close to the Hicksville streets he grew up on. A year later The Stranger would make him a superstar, but the band that played on it, and on nearly everything after, is the one Turnstiles assembled.

The audition you can finally hear

That band is the reason the first disc is the most interesting thing in the box. Joel initially tried to cut the album with producer James Guercio, sessions that were scrapped. In January 1976 he recorded takes of the songs with Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson, the rhythm section of the Elton John band and just about the most credentialed hire available to a piano player in 1976. The tracklist shows those takes running from January 19 to 21. Then, on January 23, the same songs appear again with different players: Doug Stegmeyer on bass and Liberty DeVitto on drums, the Long Island musicians Joel chose instead and kept for decades.

The box presents both sets of takes, which means that for the first time anyone can listen to the tryout in which two local players beat Elton John's rhythm section for the job. Whatever Joel heard on January 23, it held: Stegmeyer and DeVitto anchored his records and his tours through the entire peak of his career, and the liner notes frame the album as the moment the touring band, and the sound, came together.

A song nobody has heard

The set's headline discovery is a previously unheard song called Oklahoma, included twice, as a 1975 piano-and-vocal demo and in a live recording from San Francisco's Great American Music Hall. Handball, a song fans have known only from a 1977 television broadcast, gets its first official audio release. There is a complete, newly restored recording of the June 10, 1976 show at the Bottom Line in Manhattan, and the full Billy Joel Tonight concert film, shot that December at Connecticut College and aired once as a TV special, restored in HD with rehearsal footage that catches Joel loose and off the clock, running through pieces of Born to Run and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road between takes.

The rest of the box

Disc two pairs the remastered album with unreleased alternate versions, including an orchestral mix of I've Loved These Days, plus a June 1976 radio conversation with Philadelphia DJ Ed Sciaky. The Blu-ray closes with a new Dolby Atmos mix of the original album. A 40-page hardcover book carries previously unseen photographs, new liner notes from the music journalist David Fricke and historical notes from John Jackson, the director of the Billy Joel Archives, who produced the set. Preorders opened with the announcement, and a 1975 band demo of James went up on streaming services the same day as a first listen.

Why this one matters here

Turnstiles sold modestly on release and its songs became standards anyway; there are Long Islanders who have heard New York State of Mind at every wedding they have ever attended without knowing the song was recorded in Hempstead. The box is the fullest account yet of the two years in which the Island's most famous musician decided who he was going to be, and the answer, audibly, was: a New Yorker with a Long Island band. It arrives December 11, squarely in time to be the gift under a certain kind of Long Island tree.