When a musician has a career as lengthy and prolific as pop-rock icon Billy Joel, narrowing down their catalogue to a single “best” track is no small feat. The casual listener might assume Joel would pick one of his catchier, more ubiquitous tracks like “Piano Man” or “Uptown Girl”. If they were unaware of how much Joel detests this song, that listener might even include “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. But from Joel’s perspective, the best song he ever wrote was never a chart-topping hit. In fact, the bittersweet closer to Storm Front never broke into the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 20.
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Nevertheless, Joel has cited the song as his best in multiple interviews, including an appearance on The Howard Stern Show on Valentine’s Day 2024. Without a trace of hesitation, Joel called “And So It Goes” his “top song.” The musician admitted that writing the song was an emotional process, which he amplified through the use of dissonant notes and suspensions. These “sour notes,” as he called them, highlighted that there was “this sadness in something that should be sweet.”
According to Joel, he wrote the song six years before he would include it on his 1989 album about 19-year-old model Elle Macpherson. Speaking of their never-to-be relationship, Joel said, “It just wasn’t going to happen. She never, like, rejected me. But [she] just made it known that, ‘Nah, this is not happening.’” Joel said he “knew it wasn’t going to happen,” which informed the bittersweet mood of “And So It Goes”.
The Sonic Storytelling (And Interesting Word Choice) of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes”
Black-and-white emotions like sadness and anger are difficult to stomach, but few things cut quite as deep as bittersweetness. As was the case for Billy Joel and Elle Macpherson, both knew that a relationship would never work. There were no hard feelings, per se, just a vacant sense of loss—at least on Joel’s part—of a connection that never got the chance to actually start. Joel masterfully conveyed this half-sad, half-okay feeling in the discordant instrumentation, creating a melody that was melancholy and sorrowful while still a little hopeful and resilient.
But the “Vienna” singer also paid close attention to how the lyrics supported the music. During his interview with Howard Stern, he explained that he had been sitting on one particular word for a while. In the first line of “And So It Goes”, Joel sings, “In every heart there is a room, a sanctuary safe and strong, to heal the wounds from lovers past until a new one comes along.”
“I knew that the opening line was going to be very important,” Joel explained. “And a word like ‘sanctuary’ has a good resonance. What was that movie, uh, the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’? [imitating Quasi Moto’s voice] ‘Sanctuary.’ It’s just one of those good-sounding words. It was in my notebook. I said, ‘We gotta find a place for this. [There’s] got to be a home for this word.”
Joel’s relationship with Macpherson might not have worked out, but the songwriter managed to get plenty of musical material from their brief fling. Although “Uptown Girl” is often thought to be about Joel’s second wife, Christie Brinkley, Joel was actually dating Macpherson when he wrote it.
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