Once upon a time, this boy I knew took the lyrics from Billy Joel song “Only the Good Die Young” and changed the words about Virginia the Catholic Girl to better fit Katherine the Assembly of God girl, and he and his friends would sing it on school bus trips or in the last five  minutes of class when work was done. I would roll my eyes and quietly think to myself, he doesn’t even know that Catholics go to hell. At least, that is always what I had been taught in those Assembly of God churches growing up. By high school, I had gained enough sense to keep some of those teachings to myself. I was also at an age where that Billy Joel song, changed lyrics and all, created a forever memory. Even now, just the opening notes of that song take me back to those days. 

A late Gen X-er, Billy Joel was always in the background of my childhood and adolescence. Even though as preacher’s kids we weren’t allowed to listen to secular music, Billy Joel’s music was popular enough and adult contemporary enough to play over grocery store and doctor’s office speakers. In the 1980s, you couldn’t escape “Uptown Girl” or “Tell Her About It.” “For the Longest Time” was the first music video I ever saw, sneaking an episode of a syndicated top ten video show. Billy was there in the 90s too. More than one teenage boy told me, in a profound tone, “You know, if you just learned everything in ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ you’d know all of US history.” I would feign a wow, maybe that’s true, and think they were idiots, not realizing until years later that they were probably trying to impress me. I was always slow to pick up on those hints. And I really hated that song.

I didn’t really get into Billy Joel until seven years after River of Dreams, when I was in college and missing that boy who had teased me with that rewritten song all those years ago. I spent a lot of time in my college years and early 20s discovering all of that pop culture I wasn’t allowed to explore when I was younger. In the days when the Internet was small, no Wikipedia, I decided to deep dive into the Billy Joel discography and ordered the box set from Columbia House Music. I loved those boxed sets-Lots of notes and backstories, nice packaging and seemingly always on sale.

The Billy Joel box set has 4 CDs-3 are compilations of his greatest hits, and the fourth is a live performance of songs mixed in with Q and A from the audience. I would listen to these songs while studying or writing, sometimes taking a break to read along with the lyrics or stare at the pictures of Billy’s handwritten lyrics. My favorite of the 4 CDs though was the live one with the Q and A where Billy would tell stories about the background of the song or some of the process of the composition of the song. He’s a storyteller. That’s clear in the songs about Brenda and Eddie, Anthony and Sergeant O’Leary, the workers in Allentown or the fisherman on the Downeaster Alexa. And something about how he told the stories behind his songs fascinated me and brought a lot of comfort, so much so that I would listen to that Q and A repeatedly, like returns of a favorite TV show. On nights when I felt lonely or anxious, those stories and songs were there. 

Years later, Billy and his stories brought me comfort in a different way. My three-year-old son died in 2015. In the months following, I often found myself caught in this strange juxtaposition of the silence of a room or a car ride and the screaming inside my head. I didn’t want to listen to music. That was like playing emotional Russian roulette. You never know what a song is going to trigger. I remembered listening to the Howard Stern/Billy Joel Town Hall interview, and I found someone had uploaded it to YouTube. So on car rides I would pull up those YouTube uploads and listen to Billy and his stories, distracting my mind, finding comfort, anything that got me through another hour, another day. 

In my novel, Don’t Stop Believing (https://a.co/d/2XygZIK ) I wrote in the last chapter, “Mr. Brown says, ‘a good book you read once; a great book you read for the rest of your life.’ I think the same could be said for songs. A truly great song takes on different meanings with each age, with each era, with each change.” For me at least, ‌much of Billy Joel’s work fits this description. Watching the new HBO documentary about his life and work, And So It Goes, my nine-year-old daughter came into the room and found me watching and crying and asked what was wrong. It was a section about “Lullaby (Good Night, My Angel),” a song that at one time I found just to be a very sweet song, one that now, thinking about my son and the song’s promise from a parent to a child that he “never will be far away.” 

At 45 years old, 25 years after buying that boxed set, watching the documentary, I am reminded of that quote about songs staying with you but changing with time. These songs are ‌part of my memories and my thoughts. The stories and notes have comforted me, made me think, kept me company. In my book, I also made an entire chapter inspired by Billy Joel songs, and called it ‘Scenes from a Mexican Restaurant.’ In that chapter, the protagonist Mara and her friend Ben discuss Billy Joel and life over chips and guacamole and Ben says to Mara, thinking of the characters in ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,’ “Wouldn’t that be nice to have someone like that in your life? Someone that even if you married and divorced and that high school dream was a bust, someone you could just sit with.” A few moments later, he says, “When we’re like 40 and wondering what happened to our lives, what do you say? Guac, chips, tequila? Will you meet me in a Mexican restaurant?” And a pact is made. 

There is almost a certain probability that I will never literally meet Billy Joel. We’ll never sit in an Italian (or Mexican) restaurant, but these songs and stories live on, and I find a lot of gratitude for being able to sit with them, anytime I want, and think about them, think about life, maybe figure some things out, maybe have a few more questions. And so it goes.