Something to watch tonight: Thursday 9 October

Billy Joel: And So It Goes (Lacy/Levin, 2025)

And So It Goes makes for an inter­est­ing com­par­is­on with the two-part Paul Simon doc­u­ment­ary from last year, In Restless Dreams.

They are both com­pre­hens­ive stor­ies of the before, dur­ing and after of excep­tion­al careers in pop­u­lar music. The extra time allowed for with a two-part struc­ture allows for the music to extend a little more than it would oth­er­wise, mak­ing for a less frus­trat­ing experience.

Both make good use of their subject’s first-person memor­ies but also con­tri­bu­tions from oth­ers who were present. Both artists have excel­lent archives of their own and were in the media so reg­u­larly in their hey­day that there is ample con­tem­por­ary mater­i­al to illus­trate the storytelling.

The dif­fer­ence between the two films is the dif­fer­ence between the two men.

In Restless Dreams fol­lows a Paul Simon who des­per­ate to con­tin­ue cre­at­ing, Evan as his fac­ulties fail him. The music that the film watches him write and record is spir­itu­ally res­on­ant and ques­tion­ing. Seven Psalms is more chal­len­ging for an audi­ence than his reg­u­lar fare but was more chal­len­ging for him to make too.

At 81, Simon was still cre­at­ively rest­less but in 2023 his con­tem­por­ary, Billy Joel, hadn’t released an album new songs in 22 years. That retire­ment from song­writ­ing is the most inter­est­ing thing about Joel, in my opin­ion, but it doesn’t get dealt with in any depth. For many artists it’s the career rig­mar­ole — the tour­ing, the appear­ances — that gets too much and they want to con­cen­trate on their cre­at­ive lives but for Joel it appears as if it was the song­writ­ing that got too hard, took too much out of him. And he cer­tainly had noth­ing left to prove.

In And So It Goes, today’s Billy Joel appears to be con­tent with his romantic, fam­ily and per­form­ing life, not some­thing that could be said for earli­er on. There were plenty of career ups and downs, con­trib­uted to by makers and record com­pany people who did not have his best interests at heart but also by Joel’s inat­ten­tion. The rock and roll life­style was stand­ard oper­at­ing pro­ced­ure at the time but Joel’s fond­ness for booze was entirely his own and con­tin­ued well into the 21^st century.

I was lucky enough once to see Joel play in Auckland in a double-bill with Elton John. He blew John off the stage that night (to be fair Elton was suf­fer­ing from a cold) but the elec­tri­city and energy of that per­form­ance, and that cata­logue of songs, dom­in­ated the show. (And let’s not for­get, Elton doesn’t write lyr­ics while Billy Joel’s tal­ent in that depart­ment is as strong as his musicianship.)

Where to watch Billy Joel: And So It Goes

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Streaming on HBO Max

Canada: Streaming on Crave

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on HBO Max

UK: Streaming on NowTV