Billy Joel – Vienna (Audio, Lyrics)

Throwback to Billy Joel’s 1977 song titled “Vienna”. The piece of music was produced by Phil Ramone. Listen, stream, buy, read the lyrics, mp3 download.

Billy Joel Vienna

In a July 2008 New York Times article, Joel cited this as one of his two favourite songs, along with “Summer, Highland Falls”.

Why did I pick Vienna to use as a metaphor for the rest of your life? My father lives in Vienna now. I had to track him down. I didn’t see him from the time I was 8 ‘till I was about 23-24 years old. He lives in Vienna, Austria which I thought was rather bizarre because he left Germany in the first place because of this guy named Hitler and he ends up going to the same place that Hitler hung out all those years! Vienna, for a long time was the crossroads. During the Cold War, between the Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact nations and the NATO countries was the city of Vienna… Vienna was always the crossroads – between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. So the metaphor of Vienna has the meaning of a crossroad. It’s a place of inter…course, of exchange – it’s the place where cultures co-mingle. You get great beer in Vienna but you also get brandy from Armenia. It was a place where cultures co-mingled.
So I go to visit my father in Vienna, I’m walking around this town and I see this old lady. She must have been about 90 years old and she is sweeping the street. I say to my father “What’s this nice old lady doing sweeping the street?” He says “She’s got a job, she feels useful, she’s happy, she’s making the street clean, she’s not put out to pasture”. We treat old people in this country pretty badly. We put them in rest homes, we kinda kick them under the rug and make believe they don’t exist. They [the people in Vienna] don’t feel like that. In a lot of these older places in the world, they value their older people and their older people feel they can still be a part of the community and I thought ‘This is a terrific idea – that old people are useful -and that means I don’t have to worry so much about getting old because I can still have a use in this world in my old age. I thought “Vienna waits for you…”

There is also a lot of inside stuff on the song. The beginning and the end is very Kurt Weill. That kind of sick, middle-European, kinky decadent thing.. cabaret kinda…. there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on. We are seeing the result of it in this ethnic warfare in the Balkans which is a tragedy. This century started out with this Assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo and that begat World War I which begat the Russian Revolution, then you had the Depression then that begat World War II and then that begat the Cold War and all that’s over but they’re still blowing each other to smithereens in Sarajevo. So this whole thing is going on in middle Europe – it’s Kurt Weill. And some composers, Dvořák, Smetana – they captured it.”

Billy Joel has confirmed most of this account on other occasions, such as this 1994 career retrospective in Billboard.

Billy Joel – Vienna (prod. Phil Ramone)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Slow down, you crazy child
You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you’re so smart
Tell me why are you still so afraid, hmm?
Where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about?
You’d better cool it off before you burn it out
You’ve got so much to do
And only so many hours in a day, ayy

[Chorus 1]
But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you can just get old
You’re gonna
Kick off before you even get halfway through, ooh
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you?

[Verse 2]
Slow down, you’re doin’ fine
You can’t be everything you wanna be
Before your time
Although it’s so romantic
On the borderline tonight, tonight
Too bad but it’s the life you lead
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
You’re right

[Chorus 2]
You’ve got your passion
You’ve got your pride
But don’t you know
That only fools are satisfied?
Dream on
But don’t imagine they’ll all come true, ooh
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you?

[Instrumental break]

[Chorus 3]
Slow down, you crazy child
And take the phone off the hook
And disappear for a while
It’s all right, you can afford
To lose a day or two, ooh
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you?

[Chorus 1]
And you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want
Or you could just get old
You’re gonna
Kick off before you even get halfway through, ooh
Why don’t you realize
Vienna waits for you?

[Outro]
When will you realize
Vienna waits for you?