.png)
There was a time when I listened to a lot of Billy Joel with my windows rolled down.
These memories cluster in the warm summer months when the New Orleans air feels like dragon’s breath through the car window. In one of these moments, I’m driving two friends to the Quarter. It’s around 10 p.m., and we’re 18 or 19. They’d smoked something weird. It might have been weed, or some of that Voodoo spice from the gas station that made them extra crazy.
We’re listening to The Stranger, and “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” spills out from my mom’s CRV rolling down Esplanade avenue.
Drop a dime in the box, play a song about New Orleans, we shout over the speakers. We’re on the way to Café du Monde because it’s a place to go at this hour. The song is getting ready to shift gears. Billy has already brought us from the titular Italian Restaurant to the “village green” of his suburban youth. He hits the final line of this bridge:
My sweet, romantic teenage nights.
And we continue our drive through the termite-infested air.
Billy Joel slipped into my life years earlier. I was there for his notorious Jazz Fest set where the heavy rain forced a stagehand to squeegee his piano between numbers. With every churlish gust of wind, the crowd around me cheered in sardonic approval. I was maybe 12, not yet a fan, and shivering without any cover.
I asked if we could leave, my parents agreed, and we shuffled through the mud to the car. My mom and I were miserable. Part cold, and part disappointed that we were about to miss the entire show we’d waited all day to see.
My father, apparently frustrated that we hadn’t left much sooner, exclaimed: “It’s Billy Joel. Big frickin’ deal!”
I didn’t think much about that day, or Billy Joel, until several years later, when I was fishing through my mom’s CD case. I withdrew a blank disc and gave it a shot.
For the next 14 months, I listened to that CD dozens of times. It was a 15-song mix of studio tracks and live recordings spanning Joel’s career.
I was in high school, an experience that was neither turbulent nor particularly exciting. But Billy’s songs pulled me toward something resembling adulthood.
I sang along with his story of high school sweethearts Brenda and Eddie, who get married too soon, in “Scenes” (track 4), just as I connected with “Vienna” (track 12), with its opening admonishment: “slow down you crazy child, you’re so ambitious for a juvenile.”
These tracks made me feel like I’d lived 17 years waiting for something interesting to happen to me. They suggested a world where things speed up. Where you meet people and good and bad things happen and years later it’s a story worth telling.
It didn’t hurt that the tunes were also catchy.
I bought every Joel album with a Best Buy gift card that I got from my boss at the liquor store. I made playlists of my favorite tracks and burned them onto CDs—the deep cuts, my personal top 20 (see below), a full chronology of my top picks.
During these heady hipster days (2011), worshiping a ‘70s and ‘80s piano player was not a marker of taste. Even some of my more conciliatory friends admitted that they preferred Elton John.
A few weeks before graduation, I was riding with my friend, Ben, windows down, on our way to pick up a pizza. I was headed to Baton Rouge in the fall to study journalism, and he was going out to USC in Los Angeles to try to break into the music scene.
“I think you should give Joel a chance,” I told him.
Ben’s music taste was well honed, and entirely different from mine—he played “industrial techno” on our drive back from spring break as this blog’s illustrator slept in the back seat.
“Fine,” he said.
I put on “Los Angelenos” and told him it would prepare him for college. It’s a sleepy song, and after about two minutes, even I was tired of it.
“I want to listen to something from The Stranger album,” he told me. “That’s the one I’ve heard of.”
I plugged my phone into the aux and let “Movin’ Out/Anthony’s Song” take over the car. We made it to the album’s title song, which opens with 45 seconds of a cappella whistling, and Ben was impressed.
“I like this,” he told me. “Billy Joel can really whistle.”
The warm May air rushed in through the windows. We crisscrossed the city that night and let Billy Joel flood into the streets. We talked about what college might bring and convinced our friends to watch Apocalypse Now.
By graduation, I’d converted at least one person into a Joel appreciator.
As I moved through college, I began to give my burned CDs to my buddies. If a friend was dating someone, I knew her favorite Billy Joel song. Even after I played those albums to death and stopped listening to him all the time, my friend, Clay, would tell me how he loved instrumental the “Root Beer Rag” from the disc I once popped into his truck on a road trip.
I’d stumbled upon the ability to open a world up to people who liked the music. And it felt good to have them join me there, even if it happened by accident.
This time of year, when the weather turns warm and I roll the windows down, brings me back to my earliest evangelical days.
I’m 18 again, driving my sorta-high buddies to Café du Monde. The three of us just sang through the middle of “Scenes” and the horn section builds to the Bottle of Red, Bottle of White denouement.
Overtaken by the music—or the fake weed—my friend throws his hands into the air.
“Eli! You were so right. Joel is music. And music is Joel.”
Big frickin’ deal.
20. Where's the Orchestra
19. Big Shot
18. Piano Man
17. It's Still Rock and Roll to Me
16. The Entertainer
15. Miami 2017 (I've Seen the Lights Go Out On Broadway)
14. Goodnight Saigon
13. She's Always a Woman
12. Summer, Highland Falls
11. Don't Ask Me Why
10. My Life
9. Allentown
8. Everybody Loves You Now
7. She's Got a Way
6. Tell Her About It
5. Uptown Girl
4. Only the Good Die Young
3. Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
2. Falling of the Rain
1. Vienna
Thank you to Stuart Haddow for turning this into a Spotify playlist.