Only The Good Die Young

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5 MORE DAYS!!!

The songs I’m posting for my top ten are in no particular order from my least favorite to most favorite or anything like that. They are just my favorites …. and I could have done a top 20 list of his songs, but the concert isn’t THAT far away!

I’m posting these favorite songs because I was given A Magical Gift recently.

Only The Good Die Young

When I first heard this song, as a young girl, the lyrics were meaningless to me. It was all cryptic… “Come out, Virginia” meant that she must have been inside the house, “You Catholic girls wait much too long,” maybe it took a long time for her to get her makeup on or something… the only line that spoke to me was, “Only the good die young,” because, well… because my father HAD.

Like the other songs on this album, I learned all of the words. This is another song from the first Billy Joel album I listened to, “The Stranger.”

I never had a clue that the song had been banned by many in the Catholic community, or that it was banned from radio stations, and that Billy played it on Saturday Night Live while the producers nervously bit their nails in the background, waiting for a fallout. I guess, the only fallout that came from it was that it became even more popular. Billy Joel joked that he wrote letters to the arch-bishops and other who banned the song, asking them to ban his future albums as well! HA!  The inspiration, according to Joel, came early in his career, when a high school crush watched him play and he thought…..This is pretty cool! There is a real Virginia out there somewhere, but she has never stepped forward to claim her moment of fame.

So, as I got older, I understood that the song wasn’t about dying young, or about being Catholic at all, it was about young lust. Well, no matter what… the title lyric still holds a multitude of meanings for me. And the song is awesome.

What is YOUR favorite Billy Joel song? Leave the title of your favorite Billy Joel song in the comments!