broadway i saw the empire state lay low life went on beyond the palisades they all bought cadillacs left there long ago to tell the world about the way the light went out to keep the memory alive it s all these human emotions. for some reason we can tap into that as musicians. when we came up with this idea of doing this series of in-depth interviews with really extraordinary people we started thinking about whom we should try to get and whom we should ask. and we thought about the usual political figures, obama, the dali lama. and i come back to the idea of interviewing the person i really wanted to interview, and that was billy joel. and the reason is i ve been in love with his music ever since i was a teenager growing up in india. billy joel has been a rockstar for five decades. today he keeps up his nearly ten-yearlong residency at madison square garden playing the piano and belting out the lyrics that so many fans adore. he s sold more than 150 million reco
Of went like that, trying to recall a dream. that s what happened with just the way you are. i had dreamt it, i forgot it, and a few weeks went by and all of a sudden it reoccurred to me. and i was in the middle of a meeting with an attorney and accountant and i was like i ve got to leave right now, i ve got to write his song. and they went go, go write. and i was writing it and thinking i must have heard this before. did i steal this from somebody else, is this somebody else s melied. and i realize, yes, you idiot, you wrote it in your dream. you dreamt it and the dream reoccurred. and it s hard to do. i ve tried to put a tape recorder next to my bed and hum into it and sing the melied, and it always sounds like i couldn t figure out what i was doing. so it doesn t work like that. .