Joel has stated that this was his suicide note written into a song... back when he tried to kill himself by drinking furniture polish. His suicide attempt failed to kill him, but did give him an upset stomach.
"I was really depressed at the time I wrote that," Joel told Sirius XM in 2016. "I was 21, and I was just bummed out. When you're that age, you're going from adolescence into adulthood. You become so self-absorbed that your head can literally go up your ass, and you gotta pull it out 'cause if you stay there too long, it's not a good atmosphere. It's a very self-pitying song. I actually rarely go back to that album and listen to that. Although the lyric was meaningful to me at the time, now from this perspective, I can say, 'What did he know, he's 21.'"
This is from Joel's debut solo album, Cold Spring Harbor, which was named after a hamlet in Huntington, New York, near Joel's hometown on Long Island. The album cover was shot at Harbor Road in Cold Spring Harbor.
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