#Lyrics vienna waits for you full

And he was amazed by the city, the chosen home of his favorite composer-Beethoven-where music was everywhere, even in the architecture. He learned that his father had remarried and had another son, so he traveled to Vienna in his mid-20s to meet his brother and reconnect with his father. Just a few keystrokes led me to a recent video of Joel talking about how he came to write “Vienna.” His parents had split up when he was young, and his father had moved to Europe. Well, it’s easier to find the background to the song in 2022 than it would have been in 1977, when google was not yet a verb. This week of being sick got me asking myself: what’s my Vienna? And why did Joel pick Vienna when he wrote this song anyway? And we all need to “take the phone off the hook” a lot more often. Yeah, I needed to let myself lose a day or two. When will you realize, Vienna waits for you? It’s alright, you can afford to lose a day or two Joel wasn’t even 30 years old when he wrote the lyrics that spoke to 19-year old me: “Slow down, you’re doing fine / You can’t be everything you want to be before your time.” And I would still offer those words to all the college-age students I am responsible for today! But it was a later verse that really got to me this summer:Īnd take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while With its opening lines-“Slow down, you crazy child, / you’re so ambitious for a juvenile”- it seemed at the time to be a song for the young: “Where’s the fire / What’s the hurry about? / You better cool it off before you burn it out / You got so much to do and only so many hours in a day.” Who knew I would only start thinking about it- really thinking about it-more than four decades later, in my 60s?

I had sung it at the top of my lungs with a cassette tape in various friends’ cars in those late ’70s summers-all those Brendas and Eddies from my high school days. It came out during my first year of college, and I owned the LP.

#Lyrics vienna waits for you full

The next day, with my symptoms in full bloom, I had a text from my sister Missy: “You missed the concert last night, but listen to this and pay attention.” And she attached the song “ Vienna” from Billy Joel’s 1977 album The Stranger. Fully vaccinated and doubly boosted, I had outrun the virus for over two years, but just a few hours before I was supposed to join my three sisters, my mom, and a friend for the Billy Joel concert in Notre Dame stadium, I sensed the little chill that accompanies a fever, felt suddenly exhausted, and took the confirmatory home test. After a period of extreme busyness in May and June-two commencements, two reunions, a workshop in Colorado, a Board retreat, a quick trip to Texas, and a conference in Chicago-I tested positive for COVID. The Print will be Debossed in the lower Right-hand corner with the JGD Logo Stamp.July seems like the perfect month to slow down and ask: “What’s your Vienna?” And you don’t have to be a Billy Joel fan to understand what I’m talking about.īut it was a Billy Joel moment that got me thinking about this question.

No matter what you do, be good at it, and whenever you get there, you get there.' Well, wait a minute, why do I have this whole lifespan? What's the point of it? Some people will get there sooner, and some people will get there later. We tend to put older people away, and it's all about young people. The lyrics, 'slow down you crazy child' - in other words, you have a whole life. I lot of people in their 20s think they have to get it all together by their 30s and they kill themselves trying to get the golden ring. On a Howard Stern appearance Joel said that the song came to him very quickly, in what he called 'a Promethean moment.' Describing his message in the song, he explained: 'It was an observation that you have your whole life to live. One of Billy’s favourite songs according to an interview on the Late show with Stephen Colbert.