COMEBACK KID: A year separated from a halfhearted suicide attempt, Alexa Ray Joel is reborn. The 24-year-old singer-songwriter is at peace in her NoLita apartment, surrounded by old photos of her loving mom and ready for a solo run at The Plaza’s Oak Room after past gigs with her dad — like one last year at a rainforest benefit. (Victoria Will)
A year to the day after Alexa Ray Joel downed a handful of pills in a botched suicide attempt, she has a new outlook on life, a hot new single, a new gig at the Plaza’s Oak Room, a new nose, and, perhaps not insignificantly, a new apartment.
Last year, Alexa was sitting alone in her mammoth West Village loft, feeling lost and alone after a traumatic breakup.
It was a brisk Saturday afternoon when the singer-songwriter took eight doses of Traumeel, a mood and muscle relaxer, and then frantically dialed 911 complaining she couldn’t breathe.
She was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital and was released — healthy but shaken — a few hours later.
“My West Village apartment never felt like my home,” Alexa says. “It was lonely. I was out of a relationship, and I was struggling with it. It was too big for me. This feels like home.”
The only daughter of supermodel Christie Brinkley and music legend Billy Joel has decorated her plush two-bedroom pad in Nolita with embroidered pillows, scented candles and framed family photos — Christie holding a newborn Alexa in her palms, Billy sharing the piano bench with his daughter, and a picture of a young Alexa with Paul McCartney.
But the apartment is surprisingly bereft of a single shot of any friends. She has no books on display; instead there are stacks of fashion and gossip magazines and rows of VHS tapes on the shelves.
Her fridge is filled with fresh fruit, and a pot of white rice sits half-eaten on the stove.
“I have a flair for the dramatic,” the 24-year-old says of last year’s meltdown. “I got caught up in my own head. It was a panic. I didn’t want to die.
“I just didn’t want to feel what I was feeling at that moment anymore.”
Alexa, dressed like a 1940s pin-up in a vintage red skirt and a low-cut blouse, claims she’s not clinically depressed.
“I don’t like to believe in depression,” she said. “I believe if you work hard enough, you can get yourself out of it.”
Sitting at the keyboard in her home studio, Alexa says the past year has been about self-exploration and growth.
“I work on myself every day,” she said. “I’m trying to rearrange my life in a way to feel happy and fulfilled. I used to think, why can’t I wake up and be ecstatic today. Well, you have to work at that.
“I’m in a great place this year, where you start accepting yourself.”
The shock of the troubling incident also brought her divorced parents closer, she said.
“It’s important for me to feel that the three of us are a family. I e-mail them both together a lot, saying, ‘Hey, Mom and Pop.’
“It’s times like last year when you’re happy that your parents have a friendship.”
Last year, the petite crooner took to MySpace to de scribe her mood as “forgotten” and wrote “I don’t like going out and drinking to meet men!!! I always have to drag myself out the door . . . and when I do go out, I don’t meet anybody!!!”
The meltdown was triggered by the end of a five-year relationship with rocker Jimmy Riot, whom Alexa started dating when she was 19 and he was 34.
“He was my first love, my first everything,” she said. She moved into his Brooklyn apartment, and she said her parents overlooked the stark age difference.
“My dad can’t really talk; he always dates younger women,” she said, referring to his third soon-to-be-ex-wife, Katie Lee, 29, and his other young paramours not much older than Alexa.
“My mom’s really open-minded. She’s like the cool, hip mom. She didn’t mind.”
But Alexa has cut off ties with her ex since the split. “We’re not in touch, and I think that’s healthy,” she said.
Now she’s changed her tune about single life.
“I’m happily single,” she says in her velvety voice. “I couldn’t have said that last year. But I’m starting to grow a thicker skin and grow into myself, and you learn to accept your quirks and your appearance.”
(That acceptance took a little extra help: Last April, she went under the knife, and now adores her bump-free nose.)
Her focus, over the past year, has been work. She spends five hours a day in the studio with her band and spends most nights writing from her home studio.
She’s used her music as an outlet for her complicated emotions.
“I carry all of this stuff inside, and that’s what makes me a songwriter,” she says.
“You unload it in a song; otherwise you feel like you’re going to explode.”
Her first single, released in May, available on iTunes, about a girl who craves attention, is called “Notice Me” and she is scheduled to play three consecutive Mondays at the Oak Room beginning Dec. 20, where she will be the official “Artist in Residence.”
She said she’ll be performing original songs from her forthcoming album, scheduled for release early next year, plus a holiday surprise.
“You can’t follow a formula today,” said Alexa. “You can break on radio, you can break on YouTube, you can break at a venue. It’s really open-ended.”
She’s also followed in her mother’s footsteps — signing on to be the spokesmodel for the shampoo Prell, the brand Brinkley hawked in the 1980s.
“I can’t compare to my mother in the modeling department. She reminds me of Grace Kelly, but I try to embrace my own look,” says the 5-foot-2 Alexa. Brinkley has passed on some tips of the trade.
“She tells me to giggle when you’re smiling so it looks more natural in pictures,” she said.
Alexa grew up in the Hamptons with her parents, who divorced in 1994 when she was 9.
She attended the Waterfront School in Sag Harbor and the girls prep school Nightingale-Bamford on the Upper East Side and spent a year in NYU’s musical-theater program before dropping out at 19 to forge her own path as a singer-songwriter.
Growing up, she didn’t know her parents were both international superstars.
“I just thought they were popular,” she said. “I thought I was the star. We were always putting on plays, and dad would do the accompaniment and mom would dress me up like a Disney princess and be filming everything. My dream is to do a voiceover for Disney.”
“Mom has always been very enthusiastic and over the top. Dad is very low-key. They even each other out a little bit in their parenting styles.”
They both check in regularly, she said. “They both call, like, every day, which I like,” she said.
“Sometimes people complain about that kind of thing, but would you really want parents that don’t check in?”
AS she grew up, Alexa be came introverted and mel ancholy, and admits she often felt overshadowed by her gorgeous mother and talented father.
“It was never, ‘I hate my parents.’ It was more, ‘I hate myself,’ ” she admits.
“Some people are sadists, I was a masochist. I hated myself. I was very shy and insecure and felt like I was in this big shadow.
“I went through that awkward phase, and that’s why I started writing music. Now I feel like I’m getting more light-hearted as I get older.”
Even though she was born into rock royalty, Alexa said opportunities haven’t been handed to her.
“People think my dad makes this call for me, but he doesn’t know who the key players are in the current music scene,” she says.
“He’s a legend, but if I want to reach out to Mark Ronson or Linda Perry, I have to make the call myself and take a meeting with their manager.
“Doors don’t swing open because of who my father is.”
In fact, being Billy Joel’s daughter is a double-edged sword.
“I dated a guy and it was an issue because he was such a huge fan of my dad’s,” she says.
“Dad would call and this guy would run and go smoke a cigarette on the balcony to chill out. It can be weird if people are too starstruck.”
It helps to talk about the rare space of fame she occupies with other offspring of rock stars, also trying to make it as artists in their own name.
“I’ve spoken to Sean Lennon,” she says. “I hit it off with Harper Simon, Paul Simon’s son. It’s good to feel in company with people who have grown up with that pressure. I’m friendly with Keith Richards’ daughters.”
But her real idols are women crooners who have made it on their own, like Katy Perry, Lily Allen and Regina Spektor.
“I saw Regina Spektor play last summer, and I was too shy to meet her,” she said. “Maybe this year I’ll work up the nerve. I’m just enamored by her.”
Since Joel and Brinkley split, both have gone on to subsequent high-profile breakups.
Brinkley suffered one of the nastiest celebrity divorces in 2008 from Peter Cook, and Billy Joel separated from his third wife, Katie Lee Joel, last year.
Alexa said she doesn’t judge her dad for dating younger women.
“He’s Billy Joel; he can do whatever he wants!” she laughs.
She’s more enthused about her father’s latest squeeze than she was about Katie Lee.
“We’re like best friends,” said Alexa of the young Morgan Stanley exec currently linked to Billy Joel. “She’s really, really cool.”
And living through her parents’ multiple divorces hasn’t jaded her.
“I’m still a hopeless romantic,” she said. “I’d love to get married one day. Maybe 10 years down the line, but if I don’t, that’s cool, too. I really want to focus on my career.”
For now, she’s focusing on finding her own spotlight.
“My parents are a big part of me, but hopefully people will judge me for me,” she said.
“Hopefully people come to my shows with preconceived notions and leave and say, she’s got her own thing going on.”