Lessons From The Book Of (Billy) Joel
Hey, happy one year anniversary!
My first newsletter was published on April 23rd, 2021. I'm really glad I started it, it's been an enormous amount of fun putting these together and connecting with the people who read it. Which reminds me, I'm behind on answering messages from the last one due to traveling and work. I see them all though and will get back to you soon.
When I started it I promised myself I'd do it for one whole year. My plan now is to just keep going as long as I feel like I have something useful to pass along and it's still fun. My hope is that it strikes a chord in you, shakes an idea loose, or gives you a new tool to try.
Have a great weekend!
Lessons From The Book Of (Billy) Joel
Ellie and I traveled to Long Island last week to celebrate Julie’s birthday and to see her play Donna in MAMMA MIA at The Argyle Theater in Babylon. I couldn’t even tell her good she was afterward because I was so proud of her I choked up. All I could do was put an arm around her and squeeze her which was probably better than anything I could put into words anyway.
The production itself was fantastic and I say this as someone who saw MAMMA MIA dozens of times and listened to it hundreds of times on Broadway while I was selling merch in the lobby. Selling merch at a Broadway show is a great side gig for a writer. I saw tons of shows I wouldn’t have been able to afford tickets to otherwise and not only that, I could watch them over and over again to pick apart how and they worked (or didn’t). You start to see the blueprint underneath the house, you see how two actors can play the scene almost identically but still have it mean different things. I loved getting to experience those moments where a certain line or action would elicit a gasp, or crack the whole audience up at once, like cracking a whip.
One of my favorite memories of selling merch was one night after SPAMALOT I got to watch Mike Nichols give notes to the cast. The show had been running for a while, maybe two years, and over the course of that time the actors had gotten bored with the same old laughs. They had added a lot of extra bits, little by little, until it was a non-stop joke machine, milking the audience for every last little drop of laughter. And the audience happily obliged, what they were doing was doing hysterical.
The thing I’ll never forget is Mr. Nichols saying, “By adding all of this extra stuff you’ve exhausted the audience’s capacity for engaging on an emotional level. They’ve become disconnected from the story.” It’s not anything I would have ever noticed, and judging by the standing ovation every night, the audience didn’t notice either. But the following night the actors reverted back to the show that was set for opening and he was absolutely right. The show wasn’t just a non-stop joke machine. The highs were higher, the lows were lower. We (the audience) connected to the story on a deeper level. I never forgot that.
While I was on Long Island Julie and I did an unofficial Billy Joel tour, going to his hometown of Oyster Bay and Cold Spring Harbor, the town he was living in when he wrote his first record. I’ve been a Billy Joel fan since I was eight years old. I have a very distinct memory of playing my uncle’s vinyl copy of Glass Houses at my Granny Belden’s house. I looked it up this week and there’s a reason that record was in heavy rotation in the house at that time. “It’s Still Rock N’ Roll To Me” was his first number one hit. I used to love his music videos like “Uptown Girl” when they showed up on Friday Night Videos or Night Trax. (For younger readers, those were two shows that used to play hours of music videos late at night on the weekends.)
He fell off my radar until my sophomore year of college when my friend Jonathan Clark and I went to visit our friend Steve Colella in his hometown of Chicago. We drove around all of spring break with the top down on his Geo Tracker, listening to the live album, Songs From the Attic, which is where I first fell in love with one of my top five all-time favorite songs, “Summer, Highland Falls.”
After that the name Cold Spring Harbor took on a kind of mythic quality in my mind because of “Everybody Loves You Now.” There’s a lyric that says, “You know that nothing lasts forever, and it’s all been done before, ahh, but you ain’t got the time to go to Cold Spring Harbor no more.” It’s a lyric I’ve come back to over and over during the course of my life. To me it means, “Careful what you wish for.” You can have great success, you can get everything you ever dreamed about, but the danger is that you might lose touch with the people and places who made you who you were in the first place. You get sucked up into the art-making machine and lose your authentic self, or you get too busy to take a breath and go to the place that brings you back to center. Standing on the shores there, walking the same little downtown where he was living when he wrote “Captain Jack” made it all more tactile.
The whole time we were doing our pilgrimage (she’s as big a fan as I am) I was reading articles about Billy and watching YouTube videos of the Q&A’s he started doing as he got older. He talks a lot about the stories behind some of the songs and his creative process in general. There were some cool tips, tricks, and insights that I thought I would compile and share with you this week.
In this first interview he talks about the inspiration for “Summer, Highland Falls,” how he moved back from Los Angeles to a little town up the Hudson where he was left alone with his thoughts. He talks about how many creative people go through periods of manic depression. “We go up, we go down. We have these incredible, euphoric highs, and we have these depressed lows. If we can utilize them as artists it’s good. If we can’t utilize them it’s bad.”
It reminded me of a quote by the writer Donald Barthelme that says, “Art is a true account of the activity of the mind.”
Just as I’m writing this it also connected to something I heard in a general meeting this week, about something Disney uses called, I think, the “Pow chart.” It’s like an EKG that charts the emotional journey of a story. The idea is that you never want it to get stuck in the middle. Shoe leather scenes, flat exposition, hang-out sequences, these are all places where a script can flatline, rather than pushing your characters between, as the song says, “Either sadness or euphoria.”
The last thing he says in the clip is that he realized that he had things to work on and writing the song helped him confront that. I talked about this in an early newsletter, about being honest with myself about my own faults and actually using those for my characters, particularly the antagonists.
Billy Joel - Q&A: Story Of "Summer, Highland Falls"? (Nuremberg 1995) — www.youtube.com Throughout the years, Billy Joel has become known for his willingness to hold Q&A sessions with fans in settings across the globe. Here Billy performs 'Summe...
In this next clip he’s asked about the challenge of trying to be commercial but also innovative, which is something I think about every. single. day. There are a few quotes in here that I love but the main one is this: “Do what you love to do but be good. Don’t worry about being innovative or new sounding, just be damn good. Be really, really good.”
On the flight home I watched THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD, with Angelina Jolie. It’s a terrific little thriller that is spare, simple, and laser focused on character and creating suspense. It was a perfect example of what he's talking about. One of my creative mantras is, “Complex, not complicated.” This movie wasn’t trying to be too clever or twisty-turny. It took its time putting the pieces on the board, giving you just enough to get you to empathize with the characters, then it put them in grave danger and kept you on the hook until the end. It was just damn good.
I get too hung up on wanting things to be innovative or unique. I often have to remind myself of Dot’s advice to George in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s masterpiece, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. “Stop worrying if your vision is new. Let others make that decision, they usually do. Just keep moving on.”
Billy Joel - Q&A: Innovation Vs Being Commercial? (Hobart & William 1996) — www.youtube.com Throughout the years, Billy Joel has become known for his willingness to hold Q&A sessions with fans in settings across the globe. Here Billy is asked the st...
In this next clip he’s asked about the difficulty of getting older. He says it’s not hard for him because, “The best stuff is yet to be written. I still think the best stuff is in the years to come as a composer… artists can be artists until a very old age. A lot of musicians, they live to be a ripe old age because they were productive and they were doing something.”
It reminded me of that moment in my mid-thirties where I asked myself, “If nothing happens career-wise for another twenty years will you be happy?” The answer was yes, because when it came down to it the act of sitting down to write, of putting ideas together, being creative, was something that brought me joy no matter what.
If it turns out that I’ve already had my last job in TV and film I’ll still be writing in some form or another until they pry the pen or keyboard out of my hands. Having that purpose gets me out of bed in the morning.
Billy Joel - Q&A: Is Getting Older A Problem? (Nuremberg 1995) — www.youtube.com Throughout the years, Billy Joel has become known for his willingness to hold Q&A sessions with fans in settings across the globe. Here Billy answers a quest...
In this next clip, he’s asked how an artist can attract interest in their music. He talks about the music business specifically but this bit at the end really resonated with me and is something I’ve talked about a lot. He says, “There’s no road back. A true artist doesn’t stop, he doesn’t give up because he’s not accepted. He just does it because he’s driven to do it… he’s never going to be happy unless he’s doing that, and that’s what’s going to keep you going through the hard times.”
Cold Spring Harbor was Billy’s first record and he hated it. The producer he’d signed with mastered the album at too high a speed so everything was a bit too fast and his voice sounded, in his words, “like a chipmunk.” He immediately fired the guy but he still had a few years left on his contract. Rather than make another record he decided to wait them out for a few years. He was living in Los Angeles and took a job playing piano at a bar downtown called The Executive Room. That bar and its patrons would become the inspiration for his song, “Piano Man.”
I think about what that must have felt like, to have all your hopes and dreams pinned to your first record and feeling like it was a complete failure. Talk about hard times. But he put his head down and kept playing and came out on the other side with a song that I guarantee you, as you’re reading these worlds, is being played right now in a piano bar. Keep going.
Billy Joel - Q&A: How Can Artists Attract Interest? (New School 1985) — www.youtube.com Throughout the years, Billy Joel has become known for his willingness to hold Q&A sessions with fans in settings across the globe. Here someone asks how arti...
In this clip he’s asked about the inspiration for “Miami, 2017.” It starts with him living in Los Angeles and hearing on the news that New York City was about to go bankrupt. The city asked the federal government for a loan to help bail them out and the government told them to, according to a headline in the Daily News, “Drop dead.”
So he starts playing the “what if” game that writers play. “I’m picturing the apocalypse occurring in New York, the skyline tumbling down.” Then he imagines himself in the future, living in Miami in 2017, telling the story to his grandchildren. “I seen the lights go out on Broadway…”
I've seen other interviews where he talks about his writing process, and with the exception of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” the music comes before the lyrics. When he goes to write the lyrics he starts by trying to figure out what it is that the music is trying to say. What is it suggesting?
I’ve started describing my own process as, “Inspiration, interrogation, and iteration.” Step one: I come up with an idea. Step two: I ask a lot of questions. Who are these people? What do they want? What is this really about? Step three: I revise accordingly and keep trying to make it better, richer, deeper.
I love that the music was dictating a Dystopian sci-fi story here.
Billy Joel - Q&A: What Was The Inspiration For "Miami 2017"? (UPenn 2001) — www.youtube.com Throughout the years, Billy Joel has become known for his willingness to hold Q&A sessions with fans in settings across the globe. Here Billy is asked about ...
Billy's last album of original pop/rock music, River of Dreams, came out when I was a junior in college. The final song on that album is called "Famous Last Words," and it's the last song with lyrics that he ever recorded. I've always loved the conscious myth making aspect of that, of deciding that he'd said everything he had to say and closing it out with the lyrics, "And that's the story of my life."
As much as I'd LOVE for him to put out a new record I also kind of don't want him to mess with that perfect ending. That's a lesson I'm holding on to for later. Knowing when to walk away and doing it with grace.
Billy Joel - Famous Last Words (Audio) — www.youtube.com Music video by Billy Joel performing Famous Last Words. (C) 2011 Sony Music Entertainment
This last clip is just cool.
In one of the Q&A’s a kid asks to come up and play “New York State of Mind” for him. Billy asks him what key he plays it in and the kid says, “What key do you want me to play it in?” Super cocky, right? Like, you better be able to back that shit up if you say something like to the Piano Man in front of an auditorium full of people. What happens after is magical. You see Billy go from, “I don’t know about this kid” to, "I'm gonna need my sunglasses for this."
Billy Joel - Q&A: Can I Play On "New York State Of Mind"? (Vanderbilt 2013) — www.youtube.com Throughout the years, Billy Joel has become known for his willingness to hold Q&A sessions with fans in settings across the globe. Here Billy is accompanied ...
Easter Seals Disability Short Film Challenge
I mentioned that I wrote a short film for my friend John Lawson to direct for the Easter Seals Disability Short Film Challenge. It's called TACO TUESDAY and John and the crew did a fantastic job with it. The theme was "superhero." Check it out!
Taco Tuesday - 2022 Easterseals Disability Film Challenge Entry — www.youtube.com A young woman, with the ability to see into the future, uses her superpower to fight crime.
Space Center Houston Thought Leader Panel
And here's a link to the super fun discussion I was invited to take part in with Space Center Houston and SciArt Exchange. I could have spent the whole day talking about the intersection of space, art, and science with these people and came away inspired with a couple of new ideas.
April 2022 Thought Leader Series - Art and Science Converging to Further Humanity SciArt Exchange — www.youtube.com Using your imagination to fuel exploration and discovery is what the nonprofit SciArt Exchange is all about. The success of human space exploration extends b...