If you’re a Billy Joel fan, it’s unlikely that you’re going to walk away from HBO’s new five-hour documentary about his life without hearing your favourite song, because pretty much all of them are in there.
Speaking to The Guardian, co-director Jessica Levin says of Joel: “He has 121 songs in his catalogue and we used over 110.” Not much has been left on the cutting room floor, then.
What’s more, Levin says that they used the music to help tell Joel’s story. “It was a goal of ours to use it as [a] score, not just throw it in,” she says. “It’s a testament to the depth and breadth of his catalogue that we were able to do that.”
Which seems appropriate - Joel has always maintained that people should look to his music to learn what he’s all about, but he does speak in the documentary. Susan Lacy, the film’s other director, says that the star instructed them to “just tell the truth”.
We’re also promised a new level of insight into the writing of those famous songs. “Once you’ve seen this film, you’ll never hear Vienna the same way again,” reckons Lacy, who says that she kept probing Joel to find out what inspired it.
“I knew, no matter how many times he said it wasn’t about his father, it was about his father, and I finally got him to admit it in the last interview.”
Originally included on 1977 album The Stranger, Vienna has more recently been adopted by TikTok users, reflecting Joel’s ability to cross generations in terms of his fanbase. Indeed, as well as hearing from the likes of Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen in the documentary, we also get contributions from Pink and Nas.
“We started to pursue Nas because Billy’s music has been sampled a lot in rap,” says Levin. “But he started to speak about the other songs and how his father loved New York State of Mind, and we ended up getting rid of the rap [material].”
Strangely, one song that apparently doesn’t get a mention in the doc is 2024 single Turn The Lights Back On, which Joel co-wrote with Freddy Wexler. When news broke that this was being released, there was fevered speculation that a new Joel album could be on the way - he hasn’t released a new studio record since 1993’s River Of Dreams - but the star quickly put this idea to bed.
"Who makes albums anymore, anyway?" he pondered in an interview with Variety. "I think the only person making new albums these days is Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo. I don't know other people who make albums. I don't know what the marketing of that is like now."
The first part of Billy Joel: And So It Goes will air on HBO on 18 July, with the second part set to follow a week later.
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