{"id":796,"date":"2020-05-26T19:24:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-26T19:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=796"},"modified":"2026-06-26T19:28:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T19:28:12","slug":"billy-joel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=796","title":{"rendered":"Billy Joel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

March 1996, Penn State University, State College, Pa.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of first albums I purchased with my own money was Billy Joel\u2019s Glass Houses<\/em> because I thought it had the song \u201cMy Life\u201d on it. \u201cMy Life\u201d was the theme song for a show called Bosom Buddies<\/em>, a 1980 sit-com which saw Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari dress up as women in order to live in a cheap, female-only apartment building. Pretty heady stuff as an 11-year old.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Life\u201d is on 52nd Street<\/em> (which I would buy later), but Glass Houses<\/em> remains a favorite because it was one of my first record purchases. \u201cYou May Be Right,\u201d \u201cDon\u2019t Ask Me Why\u201d and \u201cIt\u2019s Still Rock and Roll to Me\u201d were hits, but \u201cAll for Leyna\u201d and \u201cSometimes a Fantasy\u201d were two of my favorites. Billy Joel\u2019s music would be a constant through my junior and senior high school years as his popularity grew and grew.<\/p>\n

But I never saw him live in the 1980s, though there were opportunities. It wasn\u2019t until 1996, when I was working in State College, that I saw him during a college lecture tour which he called \u201cAn Evening of Questions, Answers…and a Little Music.\u201d His life was at a bit of a rough patch at the time, he was recently divorced to Christie Brinkley<\/p>\n

He came out with a grand piano on the right side of the stage, and he started to take questions from the crowd, which may have been about 1,500 or so. Someone asked him about the song \u201cJames,\u201d if it was named after a friend of his, and what was the story behind it. \u201cWell,\u201d he said. \u201cIt sounds better to sing than \u2018Steve\u2019,\u201d \u2014 which is true. I want to say there wasn\u2019t a James per se, and that the name stands in for someone else, but I can\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n

He said he writes the music for all his songs before he writes the lyrics, with one exception \u2014 \u201cWe Didn\u2019t Start the Fire,\u201d which makes sense. He explained, while playing the song (which would rise to No. 1 on the charts), how the movement of the words dictated a certain pace. He was as surprised as everyone when it was a hit song.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a song in Glass Houses<\/em> where Billy sings in French (\u201cC\u2019\u00e9tait Toi \u2014 You Were the One\u201d), and when asked why he did that, he said he wanted to try it because the Beatles did it. Apparently, like just every musician alive, he\u2019s a Beatles fan.<\/p>\n

He might have talked about Christie Brinkley, though I can\u2019t quite recall (I would think I\u2019d remember someone asking him considering the timing of the divorce). Near the end, someone asked where he was now in his life, he walked up to the piano and played \u201cPiano Man.\u201d I always thought it was a planned ending, but I can\u2019t be upset watching a talent like Billy Joel play his signature song.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more to the show I\u2019m forgetting, though I remember Billy was engaging throughout. It wasn\u2019t quite a Billy Joel concert, but it was different. It\u2019s not often you leave a show knowing more about an artist than when you came in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

March 1996, Penn State University, State College, Pa. One of first albums I purchased with my own money was Billy Joel\u2019s Glass Houses because I thought it had the song \u201cMy Life\u201d on it. \u201cMy Life\u201d was the theme song for a show called Bosom Buddies, a 1980 sit-com which saw Tom Hanks and Peter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[86],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-concerts","tag-billy-joel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":798,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions\/798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}