Always liked Billy Joel, so I've decided on a few tracks, this being the first. Its lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to more than 100 headline events between January 1949 (Joel was born on May 9 of that year) and 1989, when the song was released on his album Storm Front. The song was a No. 1 hit in the US. Joel got the idea for the song while he had just turned 40 and was in a recording studio when he met a friend of Sean Lennon that had just turned 21 who said "It's a terrible time to be 21!" Joel replied to him, "Yeah, I remember when I was 21 -- I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y'know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful." The friend replied, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties". Joel retorted, "Wait a minute, didn't you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?" That was the basis. #ILikeHimHopeYouDoToo   5

jovisgoesnuts 31 Mar 2014

This is such a wonderful, iconic song, with a fabulous meaning.

BobDylan 2 Aug 2015