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There’s Never Been a Better Time to Love Billy Joel


The Tribeca screening of Billy Joel: And So It Goes played like a Madison Square Garden concert.

De Niro was at the Beacon Theatre to introduce the Tribeca Film Festival’s opening-night screening of Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin’s Billy Joel: And So It Goes. Piano Man ’s title track is about Joel’s time as a lounge pianist in Los Angeles; Streetlife Serenade ’s “The Entertainer,” on the other hand, is about how much Joel resented the popularity of “Piano Man.” A song like “You May Be Right” off his album Glass Houses, which features lyrics like “Even rode my motorcycle in the rain / And you told me not to drive / But I made it home alive” is about … well, when his ex-wife and then-manager Elizabeth Weber Small got mad at him for riding his motorcycle in the rain. These guys are an extension of all that makes Joel great: his lifelong loyalty to them as emblematic of what’s so meaningful about this type of working-class New York City artist.

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