You Can Have This Heart to Break
On Billy Joel and other stories of longing
You Can Have This Heart To Break
Dear Reader,
This isn’t my usual newsletter, there’s not really any news here. This is a Sunday afternoon musing on songs and my decades long obsession with Billy Joel (we won’t understate the truth, okay? We’ll just accept it). What is this obsession about?
It’s the longing, the Sehnsucht (the German word that C. S. Lewis tells us is closest to inconsolable longing), the ache of well…being human.
That’s the reason, or part of it anyway, that I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Billy Joel.
Last night, I watched Part I of his new documentary series (And So It Goes) and I’ve spent large swaths of today swimming in the current of his songs, wandering through the memories of where I was when I listened to each song, the concerts, the person I was and am.
I’ve been thinking about…longing.
When I say his songs are the anthems of my formative years, it’s not an exaggeration. But what is an anthem, really? It’s more than a song; it captures something essential about who we are and how we feel or what we’ve been through. It’s a declaration, that this melody, these lyrics, and this song speaks for me.
Every song is his story, and then those songs became part of my story. What an odd phenomenon for someone I’ve never met.
Twenty-five years ago, when I was writing my first novel, I pasted the lyrics for The River of Dreams on my wall with a fervent desire to be able to write even one story that might evoke the emotions of this single song. When Billy sings, “I must be looking for something sacred I lost,” he is teaching a master class on examining the human heart.
His music didn’t make me feel anything, his music exposed the way I already felt about the world, and everything in it. I was a sensitive kid who needed to know she wasn’t alone in the world.
He terrified me when he sang about sex in Only The Good Die Young; he had me wanting the kind of love he sings about in You’re My Home, and he spoke for me when he sang “I’m searching for something I’d never lose; something somebody stole.” He was the background to our teenage breakups when he released Honesty. His eight track The Stranger was interminably playing in my baby blue Firebird while I sang every word to Italian Restaurant with the windows down. You know it, about Brenda and Eddie.
There’s fun, too. Big Shot exposes what has happened to all of us at least once (if not, consider yourself lucky). “You had to be a big shot last night…. now you just don’t remember all the things you said and you’re not sure you want to know.” I cringed (and laugh) at the recognition. When he sang “Just the way you are” I longed for someone to say the same. When he screamed “This is my life,” I felt it in my bones. When I listened to the sad stories in Piano Man, I worried I might be wasting my life on triviality.
When the ground shifts, when grief visits or love blindsides me, when disappointment swamps my hopes, or happiness visits with its attendant joy, when longing for something I can’t have, for someone or something that isn’t for me, arrives with a misery that can’t be quelled, Billy’s songs have always been there.
Superstars on the documentary are there to explain the impact of Billy’s music in technical terms: Jackson Browne, Garth Brooks, Bruse Springsteen, Pink and many more. They talk about his lyrics, his energy, his melodies and their complicated and well-built structure. His first wife is there to tell the story of his rocky and complicated rise to fame, which led to the disintegration of their marriage. His best friends and his band tell their story. And it’s all so powerful but there’s something else shivering beneath all the narratives, and it’s the personal aspect for those of us who listened to his music. Those on the documentary might have been in the room for the creation of the music, but then there’s the invisible us, those who also have a very personal connection with a man most of us will never meet.
As wonderful and stunning as it’s been, his life has, by his own admission, many times, been a complete mess. Two suicide attempts. Broken hearts and friendships. Four marriages. Two rehab stints. And all the while he mined the most vulnerable places inside his soul, wrapped it in a story and then he gave it to us, the listener, the ones who needed him to be the voice of what we could not say.
In the documentary he states, “If there’s a skeleton key to unlocking what’s behind the songs, it’s my relationship with others.”
I want that skeleton key in my own work, and I admire it in others.
Again, it’s the longing.
I first heard these lines in Vienna just having moved to a new school, in 1978. “You’re so ahead of yourself, that you forgot what you need. Though you can see when you’re wrong; you know you can’t always see when you’re right.” I kept rewinding that tape, again and again, until it warped. I wanted the good stuff to hurry up and get to me, the sweet ache of longing to abate. Nothing about that song has changed for me; it still speaks the same language.
It’s a universally human attribute to say about an artist, someone we’ve never met and most assuredly don’t know, “Oh, I love him/her.”
I’ve said this about Billy Joel for so long that I can nearly convince myself I’ve met him (I haven’t but for the exception of meeting him in the river of his music and by attending the many concerts where I’ve sang along, ruining the experience for anyone around me). I’ve embarrassed my sister, Jeannie, who took me to Madison Square Garden to hear him for my fiftieth birthday when I played air keyboard and at least once cried like I was a teenager at a Jonas Brothers Concert. I danced off beat. I sang off tune.
I have always been willing and able to make a fool of myself for Billy.
He reminds me, in nothing other than an emotional timbre, of my favorite author, Pat Conroy, who also alchemized the hardships of his life. One from New York, another firmly planted in the South, they both excavated their stories for meaning so that we felt less alone.
I see now that this is also what I love in my favorite novels: the inconsolable longing.
It’s what I respond to in my favorite songs, lyrics, poetry, and most importantly, in people— anything or anyone that rips off that mask and exposes the ache, not in lament but in story, is a gift.
In And So It Goes, Billy sings this unbearably tender lyric. “You have this heart to break.” My God, I fall to my knees with that line.
The rare, talented, and brave ones who speak the soft part out loud, well, they are the ones who have me in the palm of their hand.
Like Billy Joel.
Who were those singers for you? What songs? I know we all have them.
With Love,
Patti
Meanwhile, back to newsletters with actual news coming soon!
xo
ABOUT PATTI CALLAHAN HENRY
New York Times Bestselling Author and Podcast Host
Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Globe and Mail bestselling author of seventeen novels and a podcast host. Patti is the co-host and co-creator of the popular weekly web show, podcast, and online community, Friends & Fiction.
She lives in Mountain Brook, Alabama with her husband. Her newest novel, THE STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND will be released on March 18th, 2025.
Be sure to follow Patti on social media and visit her website for the latest updates and announcements!
The musician who spoke directly to my heart was Dan Fogelberg.
I identified with every word you wrote about the connection of songs to your life. For me it is Barry Manilow. I don't know how he did it but every time something significant happened in my life he released the perfect song with the perfect lyrics to say what was in my heart. I listen to those songs now and I'm right back there in my memories.