Content warning for mentions of suicide.
You may know Billy Joel from numerous top 40 hits, but one of his bestselling songs is about having grace for oneself in the face of the suicide and depression. After all, Joel wrote the bubbly bop song You’re Only Human (Second Wind) to address teenage suicide and encourage youth to give themselves self-forgiveness: Joel himself twice almost took his own life, and wrote the song from his own experience, though his own narrative about his personal struggle with mental health is more complex and fractured than the straightforward story he sings in You’re Only Human.
The Jewish lyricist grew up in Hicksville of Levittown, America’s first suburb. During his childhood, his American-born mother divorced his father, who had escaped Nazi Germany after the Nazi’s confiscated the Joel family’s wealth. He grew up in a middle class neighborhood, with a single working class mother and went on to become a Grammy award winner and one of the best selling musicians of all time. His is a major Jewish success story, a story that was almost cut short.
Joel first publicly spoke about a suicide attempt in a 1982 article with Rolling Stone. At the time, Joel had experienced a series of landmarks successes with three best selling albums back-to-back-to-back: breakthrough smash hit the soulful The Stranger (1977) debuting at number two on Billboard 200, winning two Grammys for Record of the Year and for Song of the Year (for the song Just the Way You Are), followed the next year by jazzy 52nd Street (1978) which won the Grammy Album of the Year and earned Joel the ultimate title of Performer of the Year, debuting at number one on Billboard 200, which was then followed number one hit rock-centric album Glass Houses (1980). Yet despite his cultural success, he was often derided by critics and developed a reputation as being either “loved” or “loathed”.
The critical reviews of Joel’s three landmark albums are perhaps best epitomized by a review of the Stranger by the self proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics”, Village Voice Editor Robert Christgau. “Having concealed his egotism in metaphor as a young songpoet, he achieved success when he uncloseted the spoiled brat behind those bulging eyes. But here the brat appears only once, in the nominally metaphorical guise of ‘The Stranger.’ The rest of Billy has more or less grown up,” Christgau wrote in 1977, at the height of Joel’s career.
A couple years later, in the columns of the Rolling Stone, in an article that largely saw Joel as a lukewarm performer with a divisive narrative to his character, Joel himself spoke about the album that he dubbed his masterpiece, the Nylon Curtain. In that same article Joel dropped a bombshell: He once attempted suicide in a manner that the magazine dubbed “one of the more bizarre suicide attempts in recent annals.”
Against the backdrop of venomous press, Joel revealed an intimate secret. Though the article subheader read “early suicide attempts,” Joel is only quoted discussing one. Joel described downing furniture polish because he had broken off a serious relationship and that his career had stalled. The full truth, from later accounts, was much more dire and dramatic. Joel was having an affair with the wife of his drummer, Jon Small, in the band Attila (who would later become his first wife, Elizabeth Weber). He was experiencing housing insecurity, at one point periodically sleeping on the floor of a laundromat. Joel, however, downplayed the reasons behind a major suicide attempt to simply being young: “I think that when you’re that age…You take yourself too damn seriously.” Regardless of his own stated reasons, it’s clear he was depressed and was suicidal.
However, it’s unclear from available interviews if Joel’s depression existed before this point, and it would be speculation to guess. What triggers depression can be situational; sometimes it’s lifelong, sometimes it’s not, caused by momentarily trauma and stressors that dull with time and age. Sometimes after being triggered, it can be treated. At the moment in time Joel was experiencing his young life crash around him, he was certainly depressed.
Before he went on to attempt to end his life, he wrote a song called Tomorrow is Today. The lyrics describe how the future no longer exists and dreams never come, and the promise of a better tomorrow is addressed with a shrug and a deep sigh. As a older man, Joel would refer to the song as “more of a suicide note,” reflecting on Tomorrow is Today, written at age 21. “When you are that age, going from adolescence to adulthood you become so self absorbed that your head can literally go up your ass…it’s a very self -pitying song.”
Throughout his years he gave similarly conflicting accounts on his suicide attempt adding he took pills somewhere before or after drinking the furniture polish, sometimes saying his age was 21, 20, or 19. This was a radical move to be open about struggling with depression and suicide, even with his ableist sentiments. This was the 1980s, an era in which the press and media were still lampooning those with public mental illnesses, an issue we still see in the press today. Look, for example, at Brittney Spears in the 2000s and how her struggles were treated until they were recently reevaluated after the documentary Framing Brittney Spears. Joel, problematic or not, took a stand and risked a good deal by being open about his suicide attempts, especially given the previous hatchet jobs inflicted on him by critics simply for being a musician, let alone a man with depression.
Joel goes on to joke about the events from the fallout as farting out furniture polish, describing being hospitalized with others he called “people who really had problems,” including “guys kicking junk, homicidal maniacs, schizophrenics.” Joel saw himself as having stared into the abyss and saw those with “serious problems”: the disabled, or those who had experienced mental health crises. Even if Joel didn’t like it, these were people like him.
Joel held a contradiction of internalized ableism: stating that he didn’t have it “that bad,” passing judgements on the severity of others in the hospitalized with him, all punctuated by a classic ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps’’ sentiment that’s all too culturally common. However, Joel demonstrates a deep sense of solidarity with the depressed and those with mental illnesses, especially the young.
In 1985, during the release of Joel’s greatest hits compilation, he released a new song with the set that went onto be a number nine hit: the aforementioned Only Human. The cheesy music video explicitly deals with teen mental health crises. Joel went onto donate all of his earnings from the song to a charity aimed at tackling teenage suicide prevention.
Maybe Joel would have benefited and been freed from his realm of contradictions by consulting his Jewish heritage. Judaism views suicide as a sin, with a massive caveat understood among many denominations that if one takes their life as a result of mental illness, they were not in their right mind and therefore not accountable for their suicide to be seen as a sin. Suicide in Judaism is generally seen as a crisis of mental health and a tragedy, a product of underlying conditions. Maybe Joel was trying to take his own advice, that those who struggle with suicidal ideation and previous suicide attempts like him are “only human” and all those suffering from depression, including Joel, need to be offered understanding and grace from their communities as a solution instead of struggling in silence.
If you or a loved one are struggling with thoughts of depression or suicide, help is available. You can call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
