"Everybody Loves You Now"....this is another tune from the debacle that was the album, "Cold Spring Harbor".  I wrote in detail about the odious recording contract that Billy Joel signed as a very young man and how this album was mastered at the wrong speed, forever scarring the finished product in a post about another song from the album called "She's Got a Way"....you can read it here.

I really love this song though, in spite of the troubles it went through in the recording process.  First of all, it's got an amazing piano rhythm pattern that took me 20 years to figure out...but we'll get back to that.  It has an infectious groove, and a spunky lyric that tells the story of a self important and entitled woman who has become famous and now believes she is many orders of magnitude better than everyone else....but with a fun twist....the singer hates this about her, but still loves her.

In general I just think this song is fun to listen to and even more fun to play, even though it leaves my forearms feeling like a bowl of Jello.  I've had the pleasure of seeing Billy play it in person 4 times between 2006 and 2009....3 times in Las Vegas, NV at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, and once in Salt Lake City, UT at the Delta Center.  Each time it was a thrill to be in the room watching him play that piano part.

I've written about this before, but in case you didn't know....Billy Joel is the reason I wanted to get good at the piano.  He's also the reason I wanted to write songs.  He's also my favorite artist to listen to.  Basically without Billy Joel, I wouldn't be writing this post...I don't know what I'd be doing instead, but I can't imagine I would have embarked upon a life in music without him.  Maybe I would be making deliveries for Grubhub....that actually sounds like a nice way to spend the day if I'm honest, but let's get back to the task at hand.

Billy had the coolest piano "signatures" of anyone....figuring them out and sharing them with people has been the project of 35 years for me.  This one though....this one was tricky, and didn't come as easily or early as most of the others.  The sheet music for this didn't show me anything remotely like what he was playing (and I'm so bad at reading notes on a staff that I'm not sure it would have helped if it had), and I tried relentlessly through my teens and early 20s to crack the code, but I just couldn't find it.  Everything I tried was missing something.

I had one video of him playing it with his band in a club from 1981 during the shows they were recording to eventually compile the "Songs In the Attic" live album.  But of course, like so often, the camera rarely showed his fingers, and they had reimagined the arrangement a little bit anyway to make acoustic guitar more prevalent in the mix.  Also...this was in the days of VHS tapes and tubular 24 inch curved screen television sets....I wasn't going to learn much from that grainy quality video on that tiny screen, LOL!  So, I was frustrated for years, settling for what I KNEW was a lesser and inaccurate rendering of the song.

But finally one day when I was 33 years old, I started making Billy Joel tutorial videos and I had a small but dedicated following building for them, and I was getting tons of requests for this song.  I focused like a demon for weeks trying to figure that pattern out and again just couldn't quite get there, and finally threw my hands up in the air and said, "To hell with it!"  I just decided I wasn't going to make a teaching video for it and accepted that I'd never be able to figure it out and play it the way he did. 

Two days later, I sat down at my piano and started tinkering just to amuse myself, and accidentally my hand stumbled into what I knew immediately was the right maneuver.  I stopped in my tracks for a second and said out loud in my studio to nobody, "Holy shit, is this really it?!"  I played it a few times to make sure I didn't forget what I had stumbled upon, and then I sped it up to see if it still sounded right.  I HAD it....I FOUND it....It was MINE forever!  I kid you not, I stood up from my piano with my arms raised high in the air, hands clenched in fists as if I had just hit a walk-off grand slam in game 7 of the world series.  I even shouted, "Yes!  Hot damn, YES!" a few times.  It was truly one of the most thrilling moments of my life.

I share this story for three reasons.  First, I know some of you are under the mistaken impression that everything about playing piano comes to me easily...and I want you to know that that simply isn't the case and I get stuck on things just like you do...it's a natural part of the journey.  Second, I thought you might take some pleasure in what a dork I am when I discover something new.  And third, I want you to think about the things you give up trying to do assuming you'll never "get there".

I know I said that I had resolved to never learn this rhythm pattern, but the truth is, I never would have stopped.  I would much rather die with a dream unfulfilled, but knowing I never quit trying for it than with the regret of hanging it up because I didn't get it immediately.  Also, notice in the story that success didn't follow a linear process.  I wasn't close and getting closer every day....I had nothing....literally nothing I tried was right and I couldn't find what I was looking for, or anything remotely like it for 20 years.  But one day, BOOM...it was there.  

Maybe it WAS a linear process, but the result didn't show up in a linear way.  The result appeared to be alluding me completely with no sign of improvement until all of sudden it was just there fully formed.  It's worth remembering that this is how most things in life work.  You work with consistency at something and hit plateaus where it feels like nothing will ever happen, and then seemingly from out of nowhere, a massive breakthrough just happens.  So....if there are things that are important to you in any part of your life that you're feeling really frustrated by a lack of progress on, please remember....you don't know when the day will come that a a big breakthrough occurs....but it's coming...unless you give up.  Not everything in life is worth the effort, but for the things that are....keep going because that day will arrive.

Enjoy my cover of this song from a livestream show I did on July 12, 2020 during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and then check out a very cool vintage promo video of a very young Billy Joel performing it himself from 1972 to help promote "Cold Spring Harbor", as well as the performance with his band in 1981 that I mentioned I had on VHS. 

If you'd like to explore my piano method more deeply, my best students use my video courses and join me for conversation and twice monthly Q&A Livestreams in my private community...you can find it all HERE. Thanks.

If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube

If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube

If the video doesn't show above, use THIS LINK to see it on YouTube