The story of Billy Joel, an ordinary man

It's said of songwriters that they never truly die as long as someone still hears one of their songs, but in Billy Joel's case, not dying seems predestined: otherwise, how can one explain his surviving two suicide attempts, a bankruptcy due to fraud by his manager, three divorces, and several bouts of alcoholism? With Billy Joel, one gets the idea, watching " And So It Goes ," the two-part HBO documentary—the first of which is now available and the second premieres Saturday the 26th—that as long as there's a piano to play, he'll last. Or to put it another way: as long as the world keeps singing "Piano Man ," he'll stay.

Billy Joel went through many phases, and it's possible that each of our relationships with his music depends on the phase we caught him in. This isn't unusual: having been born in the mid-1975s, I knew Elton John during his ultra-pop phase, with the Nikitas and his exuberant MTV videos. But by then, I was already listening to the Clash, I dismissed Elton, and only much later discovered that in the 1970s he had made glorious records. A good portion of this documentary is spent with Billy Joel saying he's not like Elton, but there are parallels: both fell in love with rock 'n' roll at an early age on the piano, both were heirs to the classic Tin Pan Alley song, both were party animals for a time and then had an ultra-pop phase in the 1980s, before dedicating themselves to stadium concerts—all while battling addictions and traumas.

[the trailer for “Billy Joel: And So It Goes”:]

This means that, in practice, I only know a few songs from Billy Joel's piano ballad era and then the hits of the '80s, which I've tried hard to forget—it was music that was typically classified as MOR ( middle of the road , meaning personality-free, made to please) or AOR ( adult-oriented rock , meaning guitar music that pretended to be lively but was ultimately boring). It had never occurred to me, until I saw the documentary, what a great musician and lyricist Billy Joel is—and how close he is to people, whether he's talking about a broken heart, Vietnam, or friendship. Watching Bruce Springsteen quote Joel's lines changes our perspective—we understand why so many people identify with those songs: they reflect the dilemmas of ordinary people.

This is, if you ask me, the magic of art: transforming something born of trauma into something beautiful (or something that countless people find beautiful, even if I still find music boring) – which, like all worthwhile traumas, is familiar and goes back to childhood, and which, if it doesn't explain everything, at least explains a large part.

Joel was born in a tiny town and moved to Long Island with his parents and sister at the age of one. His mother sang in operettas, which his father, an exceptional pianist, also participated in. Billy's mother enrolled him in classical piano lessons from the age of four, but his father, despite being a pianist, neither praised nor encouraged his son's learning, and he showed early giftedness. When Billy discovered rock music, he once decided to apply it to a classical piece: his father came downstairs and slapped him so hard that Billy passed out.