This is a truly lovely song. It's a hauntingly beautiful and extremely intimate piece about a man who is in a relationship he knows will fail, but he is willing to go down with the ship anyway. Honestly, the words to this song are so beautiful and touching that the story of how it came to be feels almost unworthy of what it spawned. Billy Joel got a divorce from his first wife in 1982, after having married her prior to his great success, and found himself now single and available as a bonafide "rock star". As such, he found a long, attractive, and compelling queue of interested potential suitors...including supermodels....including Elle Macpherson.
He was pretty infatuated with her from what he has said, but it felt obvious that it wasn't going to work out from the word go. There was a big age disparity, and she was just beginning her very prolific career and had no desire to lock herself down into a relationship at that moment in time. Also, he had no real personal chemistry with her because of the difference in their level life experience....basically the only thing there was....she looked like Elle Macpherson, and he knew it from the word go. So this lyric came from his willingness to ride the wave of the flame, even though he knew it was going to burn out fast. For example, "So I will share this room with you, and you can have this heart to break."
It is a unique lyric for Billy also in that it uses the "iambic tetrameter" meter, which was a practice common in ancient Greek & Latin poetry. Musically, this song is unlike anything else in his catalog. The meter of the lyrics overrides any time signature one could assign to it....it simply follows the pace and cadence of the lyrics. And nearly every chord has some kind of dissonance or tension in it...a blend of major 7s and suspensions, very rarely releasing. The musical tension helps convey the yearning and foreboding of the lyrics. He was inspired to the musical idea both harmonically and rhythmically by a Scottish folk song called "Barbara Allen".
Normally I'm inspired to some deep philosophical ideas after doing my research and detective work around a song for these posts, but this one mostly made me laugh a bit because of how deep and soulful the song turned out and how superficial the situation that inspired it turned out to be. But I suppose there is a lesson in that for a creator. No situation you encounter in life is too small, silly, or absurd to be the jumping off place for a creation. And just because the experience is a little shallow doesn't mean that the creation or the idea at the essence of the experience will be.
Yearning is yearning....even if it's for a peanut butter sandwich because you're traveling somewhere remote and it's just simply not available (I admit...I've had this experience, but don't judge me for my high level of exuberance for peanut butter on bread)...and that emotion, regardless of what sparked it within you can be a great basis for creative expression. Or, you might feel an emotion that is triggered by something kind of silly but then be inspired to a memory of feeling that same emotion about something not so silly. The spectrum of potential experiences are vast...but the spectrum of potential emotions is much narrower. I suppose that is the great equalizer in life amongst all of us. A billionaire and a vagabond have totally different potential circumstances and experiences, and yet the same palette of emotions available to them. Happy is happy, sad is sad, and everything in between, regardless of what you're living that inspires it.
I know this to be true because I've been in love before....with someone I couldn't be with every day, and the yearning was powerful....the same yearning I felt for a peanut butter sandwich on my driving trip through middle Europe....the difference wasn't the emotion, but rather the intensity and persistence of it.
At any rate, I have decided to experiment with this....I'm going to try to tap into an emotion over something that feels small in scope, and see if I can harness it as the basis for writing a song. I'll let you know how it goes.
Enjoy my cover of this song from a livestream show I did on July 12, 2020 during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and then check Billy Joel's own performance in 1990 that was captured to make the official music video for the song.
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If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube
If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube