Stream It Or Skip It?

“I’m doing well – let me screw this up somehow.” From the big hits to the baggage, Billy Joel interprets the arc of his life and career in And So It Goes, a massive two-part documentary airing across two nights on HBO Max. Directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, and exec produced by Tom Hanks, So It Goes weaves candid sit-downs with Joel, now 76, into an oral history that digs deep into his Long Island roots, his at times pugnacious personality, his family and marriages (including to Christie Brinkley), and the creation of many of his most iconic songs. At over 5 minutes, “Piano Man” is long for a radio hit that’s become a universally accessible singalong. But each part of Billy Joel: And So It Goes clocks in at over two hours!    

Opening Shot: His boat, the Alexa, is parked outside. And MiddleSea, his red brick mansion, hugs the hills of Long Island’s north shore. He used to wonder about those rich folks’ lives, when he worked on oyster boats as a kid. “Well,” Billy Joel says in a voiceover, “I own that house now.”  

The Gist: MiddleSea is actually for sale, if you’ve got 30 million bucks lying around. But in Part One of Billy Joel: And So It Goes, as he sits with an unlit cigar at a gorgeous grand piano, the mansion is where the multiple Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer recalls the life and times of William Martin Joel. “Love can make you write music. But heartbreak can do the same thing.”

No narration here, but there are cutaways. As Joel recalls his early life as a kid who moved from the Bronx to Long Island, and his initial forays into music – from piano lessons at home to the first “bad Beatles song” he wrote, and acquiring a Hammond B-3 as a member of juke box group The Hassles – we also hear from Elizabeth Weber. Weber was married to Jon Small (also interviewed here), Joel’s bandmate in the Hassles and, later, the scraggly organ-drums duo Atilla. But it was her connection with Joel that came to define a time in their lives that moved the needle on their own romance and his burgeoning career. They got together, she became his manager, and by the time of 1977’s name-making The Stranger, Elizabeth and Billy were finally in control of what they wanted from the music industry. Keep in mind, Joel’s a guy who liked to get into “pissing contests” with the industry and his critical haters. 

Weber heard the power and grace in the songs he was writing. “Piano Man,” “Just the Way You Are.” But she also kept him and his band on track. “Some of my friends call me The General,” Weber says in And So It Goes. “There’s no one driving the train if you don’t have a strong, efficient manager.” 

We also hear from contemporaries and notables in Part One, including Bruce Springsteen, signed to Columbia Records in 1972, the same year as Joel; Paul McCartney, who says “my ears perked up” when he first heard Joel’s music; and Nas, who says “Piano Man” is like a mirror facing a mirror. Because sure, the microphone smells like a beer. But Joel’s singalong ballad is also a deeply lyrical examination of shattered dreams set to a waltz. “We stuck to a lot of where we came from in what we wrote about,” Springsteen says, but Joel was also well-versed in classical forms, Broadway, and Tin Pan Alley. “Which is why Billy’s melodies are better than mine.” 

Three-peating at the Grammys – in 1979, 1980, and 1981 – will certainly make you a “Big Shot.” (Joel calls that classic a “hangover song.”) But we’ve all seen enough music docs to know that great success usually brings the risk of erratic turns, and as And So It Goes anticipates its second installment, it has the space and steady, informative pace to explore all the chapters of Joel’s life in granular detail. “When everything’s going good, I tend to wonder when the other shoe’s gonna drop.”    

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Our current streaming era is thick with music docs of all kinds. But And So It Goes joins Never Too Late, Elton John’s candid examination of his 50 years at the bench of a piano, and Get Back, Peter Jackson’s climb-inside-the-moment study of the Beatles in their crash-out era, as another top-shelf, exhaustive look at an esteemed veteran artist.

Our Take: What huge pop star is writing songs like Billy Joel right now? Tate McRae? Don’t answer that. One of the very cool things about And So It Goes is its patient exploration of Joel’s writing process and crafting of songs. With a rich vein of archival film and audio to mine, and takes from Joel’s bandmates, industry legends like Clive Davis and producer Phil Ramone, and his peers and collaborators, there’s so much detail here that even “Piano Man” – which is easily one of the most overexposed, wrung-dry songs on the planet – sounds new again. That’s a real feat for a doc, and proof that the giant-sized run-time of So It Goes is more than warranted. 

With Joel riffing on his own life, career, and past in general, he’s afforded a similar amount of space to interpret it however he wishes. And with no external narration, it’s his POV that dominates. So are there a few nods toward revisionism here? Probably. But Joel’s bug-eyed charm and East Coast guy’s sense for storytelling are still vital, and those qualities pop in the doc as he reaches back for anecdotes and, conversely, the times when he royally fucked up. Mistakes meet resilience, and for five decades he’s lived between those poles at a grand piano, breaking a bass string while clamoring to sing to us about it.  

Sex and Skin: Nah. The first section of And So It Goes gets more into the hijinks, as Billy Joel and his band of New Yorkers – “the mean bros” – rode their waves of success. “We loved our alcohol,” is how drummer Liberty DeVitto puts it.    

Parting Shot: After two-and-a-half hours, we’re only at 1980 and Glass Houses! But also the dissolution of Billy Joel’s marriage to Elizabeth Weber. And his serious motorcycle accident. And the specter of alcohol abuse. And Part Two of And So It Goes will just keep digging.  

Sleeper Star: Elizabeth Weber, Billy Joel’s first wife, was also his manager in those heady 1970s years of escalating popularity, and her interviews are a wonderful, thoughtful guide through Part One of And So It Goes. But we also want to shout out the dudes in the band. “He needed some grease,” says sax player and Long Island guy Richie Cannata of originally getting together with Joel. “And we were the sauce.”  

Most Pilot-y Line: So many of Billy Joel’s most memorable songs were written about what he knew best: his own life. He seems to know there’s good and bad in that. “I can’t say there wasn’t a time when I wasn’t struggling with something. There’s always a struggle, to the end. And so, I learned, life is a fight. And it was a good lesson to learn. After Glass Houses came out, I was always on the road. Working, working, working. I look back on that guy, I don’t even know who he was. He had to be so ambitious to work that hard, and work that much. So it must’ve not been easy to be married to me at the time.” 

Our Call: Stream It. Presented in two big parts and running to nearly five hours, Billy Joel: And So It Goes is the ultimate statement on the singer, musician, and bandleader. “Only the Good Die Young,” he once told us. But crying with the saints will have to wait, because Joel’s still out here laughing with the sinners.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.