When In Rome

When Billy Joel was putting together his Storm Front album in the late '80s, he had a slight preoccupation with tabloid gossip that suggested he and his supermodel wife, Christie Brinkley, spent their lives enjoying the spoils of their collective wealth. But nothing could be further from the truth, he says. In this track, they're just a normal couple who go to work every day and come home to each other at night. "There's a song on Storm Front called 'When In Rome,' about a working couple – working like us. Now, we may not have the same kind of jobs everybody else has. But we do work. We probably work harder than the people who comment on us. I've actually had journalists write nasty lies about my kid. She never hurt anybody. She's not even four years old."

Joel also defended Brinkley against the gossip rags in "That's Not Her Style."

Most of Billy Joel's albums have a song that he doesn't like. On Storm Front, it's this one. He told Sirius XM in 2016: "It's a cliché: 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.' It's one of my crappy songs. I wish I could take that one back. When I'm home, all it's gotta be is me and you, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Wow, how profound. I think I was just tapped out ideas when I wrote that one." Joel explained he's not like other songwriters who write a hundred songs for a project and then pick a handful for an album. That means he doesn't have a cache of unused songs to fall back on when he gets burned out, so sometimes he ends up with a clunker.