(In a 2008 New York Times interview, he wrote off “Just the Way You Are” as merely “a wedding song.”) But I think one of the reasons why people respond to “Vienna” is that, unlike something like “Piano Man,” it hasn’t been shoved down our throats for the entirety of our lives. Released in 1977 and inspired by a trip to see his father, “Vienna” has emerged as one of his most enduring tunes, a happy fate considering that Joel can be awfully dismissive of his big hits. And it’s his most popular track on Spotify. “I tend to like the album tracks, not the ones that are the hit singles,” Joel said during the interview, later noting, “We give the audience a choice : ‘You want “Vienna” you want “Just the Way You Are”?’ They pick ‘Vienna.’” When the musician was on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2017 and talked about “Vienna,” Colbert said it was his favorite. But it’s become beloved, not just by Joel. When Billy Joel is asked to name his favorites of his own songs, “Vienna” is often cited. “He was never really happy because he didn’t become a musician,” Joel said the year after his dad died. Howard would live out the rest of his days in Vienna. “Because he left Germany in the first place because of this guy named Hitler - and he ends up going to the same place where Hitler hung out all those years.” But Howard loved his new life - he had remarried and had another son - and seemed happy to leave America and Billy behind. The two men lost touch until Joel was in his early 20s, discovering that his father was living in Austria, “which I thought was kinda bizarre,” Joel later told an audience. Joel’s parents split up when he was eight, his dad moving back to Europe. He said, ‘I’m a hack, I can’t play, I’m just doing it for me.’ And he’d say, ‘This is how I make my living in America: I work for G.E., and everything is plastic, American plastic.’” But he thought he was never good enough he never gave himself any slack. He could interpret them and make them sound as good as anything that was being played on WQXR radio or the records. “He would come home from work at General Electric and take Chopin and Bartok pieces and work through them laboriously this was his entertainment. “My father was my idol as a pianist as a kid, because he was classically trained and could read music,” Joel once said.

Billy was born in 1949, growing up in a household filled with music. Born in Nuremberg in 1923, Howard fled Europe with his family to escape the Nazis, marrying Billy’s mother Rosalind after they first met while working on a production of The Pirates of Penzeance in New York in 1942.

Billy Joel didn’t have the easiest relationship with his father.

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