Although most documentaries and biopics about celebrities decide to sanitize and glamorize a pop culture icon’s life and smooth out the jagged edges, “And So It Goes” comes as raw as its subject. Billy Joel spares no words or expense to tell the deepest, darkest parts of his life in tandem with his greatest triumphs in a five-hour documentary that reflects on the 76-year-old’s life and legacy.
His music is his life, and his life is his music. They are inseparable in a broken, beautiful way. The documentary is so special because it lets Joel talk about himself in a way he’s not used to, his music self-admittedly being the dominant way he communicates. He actually resisted producing the documentary for a while because of it.
Joel was surrounded by music for his entire childhood. His father, the late Howard Joel, was a classical pianist. Billy Joel makes a note in the documentary their musical styles always clashed, with Howard Joel always harping on compositional purity and accuracy while Billy Joel preferred to improvise and play by ear. Eventually, Howard Joel left when Billy Joel was still a teenager.
“Vienna,” one of Billy Joel’s most iconic songs, is about how he went searching for his father and eventually found him decades later in Vienna, Austria. The song is a bittersweet coming-of-age tale about satisfaction with one’s life and uses Vienna as a metaphor for one’s dreams and ideal self. The genius in Vienna as the location is it is not only where Billy Joel reconnected with his father, but also because Vienna is “the musical capital of the world,” where some of the classical legends Billy Joel grew up playing lived and died. “Vienna” is the perfect coalescence of Billy Joel’s life, emotions and personal connections that pay homage to his family, his inspirations and the millennium-legacy of human musical ingenuity.
Billy Joel’s life was one of mountainous highs and hellish lows, seeing three divorces and his most consistent relationship being a toxic one with alcohol. His music is a smorgasbord of the people and emotions who have entered and exited his life and the documentary ensures to get opinions from not just Billy Joel himself, but his ex-wives, children and other family, such as his half-brother from Austria he never knew about until he took that trip to Vienna.
His first wife and manager, Elizabeth Weber, is the “waitress practicing politics” in “Piano Man.” His second wife, the supermodel Christie Brinkley, is the “Uptown Girl.” The documentary even features a little discrepancy between Billy Joel and Weber about the song “Big Shot.” Billy Joel insisted that the song was written exclusively about himself and the clarity of the morning after a night out partying, but Weber claimed with a chuckle the lyric, “They were all impressed with your Halston dress and the people that you knew at Elaine’s,” was too specific to be coincidental.
The song for which the documentary is titled, “And So It Goes,” is about Billy Joel’s handful of heartbreaks and tenfold vulnerabilities over the course of his life. In a 2024 interview with Howard Stern, Billy Joel said it was his favorite song he has ever written, a perfect composition. The piano score deliberately includes a dissonant note in every chord, a broken melody begging to be resolved, but it never is. And that’s by design. Billy Joel’s genius manifests in that song and makes it the perfect, mellow and melancholy title for a documentary encapsulating his life.
While so many celebrities who make appearances and performances in their 70s and 80s are bereft of the passion and capability that defined their success in their early lives, Billy Joel emerges as a clairvoyant of the human experience whose stories only get better as he gets older.
The documentary notes his stories make more sense and hit harder coming from Billy Joel in older age than in his younger years because now he’s lived the experiences he wrote about and has even more time to reflect on them. Billy Joel was never a character or a persona. The man was his truest self every time he took the stage, and this documentary was no different.
“And So It Goes” proves Billy Joel’s career success is not a fluke. He does not know what he wants out of life. He is not some inaccessible, godlike figure whose fans kiss the ground he walks on. He’s a human being, and his stories are about human beings, garnering over 31 million listeners every month on Spotify alone, even decades later.
Jack Solon is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note the opinions expressed in this column do not represent those of The Post. Want to talk to Jack about their column? Email them at js573521@ohio.edu.
