“Music saved my life,” Billy Joel admits in HBO‘s And So It Goes. “It gave me a reason to live.” That stark, emotional admission sets the tone for the powerful two-part documentary premiering July 18 and 25, offering an intimate portrait of the six-time Grammy Award-winning Rock and Roll Hall of Famer.
Directed by Emmy winners Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, the film traces Joel’s journey from his childhood in Long Island through his slow and steady rise as a hitmaker — ultimately revealing the “heart and soul” behind decades of iconic songs.
“Our abiding principle was to let the music lead so that people could understand what made this artist tick, and what went into his music, and to get a peek behind his process but also an understanding of how his real-life experiences fed his music and his lyrics,” Levin tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Joel has written 121 songs, and the film includes 110 of them, Levin says.
“One of the things that we are really proud of is that the entire film is scored,” Lacy says. “Including much of his classical music.”
And So It Goes explores the forces that shaped Joel’s artistry: his deep roots in classical music, the trauma of his father’s family and their flight from Nazi Germany and the often volatile dynamics behind the scenes. Rare archival footage, home movies and candid interviews paint a fuller, more complicated picture of the Piano Man — brilliant, driven, combative, sometimes conflicted and ultimately enduring.
The women closest to Joel in his life like ex-wife and former manager Elizabeth Weber, his daughter Alexa Ray Joel and his current wife Alexis Roderick opened up about the family man behind the spotlight, while legends like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne and Don Henley reflect on Joel’s legacy as a songwriter.
Ahead of Part One’s Friday release, Lacy and Levin spoke with THR about getting Joel to open up, exploring his influence on contemporary music and reframing his catalog.
Billy Joel is famously private. How did you get him to trust you with his life story?
Lacy: He actually said to me, “it’s not my film, it’s yours. The only thing I ask is tell the truth. Just tell the truth.” And he came to the table with that, and I did about 10 very long interviews with him, and he delivered. I don’t know that he was actually really ready at the beginning to tell his story, but he came to realize that we were making a very deep film, a very serious film, the one that was really going to explore his music and how it connected with his life.
We were interested in his craft and his process and where his inspirations came from, and where his musical training came from. And, it wasn’t a fly-by-night, drive-by portrait, as many people do. He recognized that this was serious, it was also going to be long. So at one point, he said to me, “You going deep?” And I said, “Yeah, and you know you’re going to go deep too.”
You brought on a lot of stars, the biggest names in music. What was the outreach process like? Were they immediately on board, or did it take persuasion?
Lacy: I think musicians love Billy, and they recognize his genius. The only person who turned us down was Elton John.
You had Nas in there, and Pink and Garth Brooks. Nas sampled “Stiletto” in a song. How important was it to have artists from different generations and genres?
Levin: We are always interested in how an artist permeates culture on different levels and in different generations. We were doing some research and I just came across the fact that Billy’s music had been sampled a lot — and I’m not surprised because he’s written a lot of great hooks, he’s written some incredible melodies that are very hummable.
We had the idea to interview Nas because he sampled Billy, and we thought maybe he would talk about Billy’s music being sampled in rap — which he did talk about but didn’t quite make it into the film. Instead, we discovered a really eloquent talker about Billy Joel’s music.
You focused on some of the critics — like Dave Marsh — who were negative about The Nylon Curtain. Then you cut from that review to a funny comment from Bruce Springsteen. Was that intentional?
Lacy: We actually wanted to interview some of the critics of Billy, and most of them turned us down. I guess they just didn’t want to go on record for the definitive piece. But also, I think that a lot of the critics came around. I think it was hard for critics to understand Billy because he wasn’t typically rock and roll. I mean, as Bruce says, he didn’t have that “rock-and-roll-y stuff.”
You also addressed his psychology — his search in Vienna, discovering his father and his family history dating back to the Holocaust. How did that feed into “Vienna?”
Lacy: It speaks to that underlying rage, the thought that ‘I would’ve liked to have known my family, they were wiped out in the Holocaust.’ Many of them were in Auschwitz. He didn’t know most of that. He had complicated feelings about going to Vienna because it was a seat of Nazism, but it was also the home of the composers he loved, and it’s a city surrounded by music.
I think people will not hear that song the same way again after they see this film, when they see the connections to his history, to that city and his own connection to his father, or lack of connection to his father. In the film, Howard Stern says he thinks that the driving force in Billy’s life was trying to connect with his father through music. I think Billy’s story is way deeper psychologically than Billy wants to know.
You structured the doc chronologically by album but slipped in emotional flashbacks. How did that work?
Lacy: I didn’t want to go completely linear. So that’s why the childhood — the real childhood, the mother, the father, the abandonment, his mother’s bipolar issue, all that — doesn’t come in until he comes back to New York writing “New York State of Mind.”
I think once you start with the baby pictures, you kind of lose people. But by the time we got there, I think people would be interested in knowing that early childhood, and because it’s so intrinsic to who Billy became. And the other thing that’s really completely nonlinear was when he did The Nylon Curtain — when he began to write about things other than himself, about the steel mills closing and Vietnam vets. And even though it’s traumatic, that’s the moment where he walks out on stage wearing a yellow star. He never wanted to be particularly political, but that this was a bridge too far, and he had to begin to comment on it. And that takes us back to his ancestors’ story.
Have you talked to Billy since the revelation of his recent health problems?
Lacy: I haven’t spoken to him. He did write to me when he saw the film to express his feelings about it, which were very positive and very nice to thank me for “connecting the dots of his life.”
What do you want people to take away from watching?
Levin: The takeaway for a fan is going to be a completely new lens on his catalog, and a revisiting of many of the songs and seeing them in a completely new way.
The takeaway maybe for a non-fan is maybe to understand and appreciate who Billy is as a musician, even if you don’t love his pop songs. That he’s a really gifted musician who is influenced by so many different genres of music, and he followed his heart musically. They’ll get a glimpse into why people connect with Billy so much, and why he’s an enduring and important part of American musical history.