There are two things in this world which can make me laugh aloud with sheer pleasure. Pleasure, mind you, not mirth. I am speaking about a feeling of joy and wonder so irrepressible that it can’t be experienced only internally which comes out of you, surprising yourself as well as those surrounding you, as you do your groceries or look out the window. One of these things, for me, is the experience of remembering really great sex with somebody you’re falling in love with; suddenly shy before yourself, and smug, and incredulous at the good luck. The other thing is listening to the Billy Joel album The Stranger.
I came to Billy Joel only recently, and in the least credible way imaginable. The hardcore Joel fans will have my head for admitting it. I was watching the silly Ryan Murphy Netflix show The Politician in September last year, in which Ben Platt plays Payton, an ambitious teenage wannabe future-president. The first series ends with his boyish determination quashed and him decamped to New York to hang around piano bars getting pissed and belting out tunes.
To be honest, the whole plot point of Payton being a lovely singer and pianist doesn’t really have enough to do with the rest of the show and was presumably shoehorned in because of the smooth, Disneyfied perfection of Platt’s singing voice. But whatever. He sings ‘Vienna’ and it’s lovely.
I had heard of Billy Joel before seeing this of course, not being new to planet Earth, but had only experienced his music through it being lampooned, or as cheesy covers, or via snippets of ‘Piano Man’ or ‘She’s Always A Woman’ appearing in adverts or films. I’d never before, impossible as it now seems, listened to a Billy Joel song in its entirety. I looked up the original version of ‘Vienna’ once the episode was over and added it to my regular rotation, but it would be spring 2020 before I fell for The Stranger wholly.
My father and I used to fantasise about going to New York together when I was a small child. He was there as a young man when a play he had written was being performed off-Broadway. His lighting designer, who had grown up in the same small estate as my dad back in Ireland, turned to him as they smoked outside the theatre, taking the city in, and said: “Not bad for two boys from John’s Park.”
We still haven’t made it over jointly, but the unapologetic sentimentality ingrained in me about it as a destination meant that on my first time there, for a brief work trip in 2018, I burst into tears emerging from a subway out onto Broadway while Sinatra played in my headphones. I am very in favour of this kind of totally unsubtle and uncool on-the-nose soundtracking. In March this year, I was on my way back over for a long-awaited three-month sojourn, and asked my friends for New York song recommendations. My old pal Conor went a step further and made an exquisitely paced, thematically relevant playlist, and it was from t…
