4/19/2023 0 Comments Billy joel vienna![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Recently, his legacy was interrogated in a length New Yorker piece and his catalogue ranked in full- all this around the time that it became clear that his monthly gig at Madison Square Garden was going to be a indefinite staple. This prevailing dismissive attitude at Joel has persisted for decades, but in an age when Just Good Pop Songs are more likely to be treated with respect, the cult of Joel seems to be strengthening, or at least given its due. Vienna can also be found on the soundtrack of 13 Going on 30.Like Miller, Joel has been an object of excoriation well beyond the critical realm - with Joel, the stigma came with plenty of Long Island mockery, to boot. Due to licensing restrictions, the song has been omitted from the episode on DVD. ![]() And some composers, Dvořák, Smetana - they captured it.It was played in a 1981 episode of Taxi called "Vienna Waits." Marilu Henner's character Elaine Nardo refers to the song while on vacation in Europe with Alex Reiger, played by Judd Hirsch. So this whole thing is going on in middle Europe - it's Kurt Weill. This century started out with this Assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo and that begat World War I which begat the Russian Revolution, then you had the Depression then that begat World War II and then that begat the Cold War and all that's over but they're still blowing each other to smithereens in Sarajevo. We are seeing the result of it in this ethnic warfare in the Balkans which is a tragedy. That kind of sick, middle-European, kinky decadent thing. The beginning and the end is very Kurt Weill. I thought "Vienna waits for you."There is also a lot of inside stuff on the song. In a lot of these older places in the world, they value their older people and their older people feel they can still be a part of the community and I thought 'This is a terrific idea - that old people are useful - and that means I don't have to worry so much about getting old because I can still have a use in this world in my old age. We put them in rest homes, we kinda kick them under the rug and make believe they don't exist. We treat old people in this country pretty badly. I say to my father "What's this nice old lady doing sweeping the street?" He says "She's got a job, she feels useful, she's happy, she's making the street clean, she's not put out to pasture". She must have been about 90 years old and she is sweeping the street. It was a place where cultures co-mingled.So I go to visit my father in Vienna, I'm walking around this town and I see this old lady. You get great beer in Vienna but you also get brandy from Armenia. It's a place of urse, of exchange - it's the place where cultures co-mingle. So the metaphor of Vienna has the meaning of a crossroad. Vienna was always the crossroads - between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. During the Cold War, between the Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact nations and the NATO countries was the city of Vienna. He lives in Vienna, Austria which I thought was rather bizarre because he left Germany in the first place because of this guy named Hitler and he ends up going to the same place that Hitler hung out all those years! Vienna, for a long time was the crossroads. I didn't see him from the time I was 8 'till I was about 23-24 years old. "Vienna" is a song from Billy Joel's 1977 album The Stranger, released as the B-side to his "She's Always a Woman" single.In a July 2008 New York Times article, Joel cited this as one of his two favorite songs, along with "Summer, Highland Falls".Why did I pick Vienna to use as a metaphor for the rest of your life? My father lives in Vienna now. This is free piano sheet music for Vienna, Billy Joel provided by ![]()
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