CNN
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When Billy Joel released his fifth studio album, “The Stranger,” in 1977, the song “Vienna” went largely unnoticed.
It was not one of the four singles released in North America, but merely a B-side to the hit “Just the Way You Are.” While the album catapulted Joel to critical and box office success, “Vienna” seemed destined to remain a low point in his discography.
But over the years, the bluesy number became popular with listeners and developed into a cult song – today it is one of Joel’s three most streamed songs on Spotify, along with “Uptown Girl” and “Piano Man”, and an official music video was released just last April.
The driving force behind the song’s slow resurrection seems to be, at least in part, teenagers and women in their twenties and thirties.
On social media, young women are raving about the decades-old song and their emotional connection to it. “Nobody understands a woman in her twenties like Billy Joel did in 1977 when he wrote Vienna,” one woman explained on TikTok. Another said the song inspired her to go on a solo adventure to the Austrian capital. Quite a few have had the lyrics and other “Vienna”-inspired images tattooed on their bodies.
According to one meme, “Being a girl means sobbing to Vienna.”
Although “Vienna” was written nearly 50 years ago, it is as timely and relevant to a generation of young women as ever. Joel (who counts the song as one of his favorites) has theorized that the song’s appeal to young women stems from its appearance in a key scene in the 2004 romantic comedy “30 Going on 30.” The film, starring Jennifer Garner, tells the story of a disillusioned teenager who wants nothing more than to grow up fast – only to discover that it’s not as great as it’s been touted.
“This is a movie that was popular with girls, and girls are where the enthusiasm for the song comes from the most. Beyond that, I’m not sure,” he said in a 2018 interview with Vulture. “It’s a coming-of-age song: ‘Slow down, you crazy kid.’ So I guess it resonates with younger people. It’s fun to play.”
Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
Joel (second from right) has said that the inspiration for “Vienna” was an encounter with his father when he was in his twenties.
“Vienna” is written from the perspective of an older and wiser person urging a young and ambitious dreamer to slow down (“Slow down, you’re doing fine / You can’t be everything you want to be before your time comes.”) It’s a rejection of competition—a comforting reminder that life is long and it’s OK not to have everything figured out.
“We live in a society obsessed with fast living and ‘grind culture.’ How much can you do and how fast can you do it?” Shauna Murphy, a 22-year-old from Dublin, wrote in a message to CNN. “As young women, we put so much pressure on ourselves to play so many roles in such a short amount of time that Vienna’s performance is an instant reminder that sometimes it’s OK to slow down and take a breath. Everything will be OK in the end.”
Mirelle Ortega, a 34-year-old writer and illustrator from Los Angeles, remembers being ecstatic when she first heard the song during a summer break from college. She was worried about her future at the time, and the lyrics were exactly what she needed to hear.
“I don’t know why, but our late teens and early twenties sometimes feel like the end of the world. We all feel enormous pressure to have everything sorted, and there’s a sense that the path we choose will either doom us to success or failure,” she wrote in an email. “I think ‘Vienna’ perfectly expresses that this isn’t true.”
“Vienna,” the song’s chorus says, “is waiting for you.”
Joel’s use of Vienna as a metaphor for the rest of one’s life stems from an encounter with his father in the city. As the singer-songwriter has explained in performances and interviews, his parents separated when he was a child and he was estranged from his father until the two met again in Vienna in his twenties. During that trip, a conversation they had left a lasting impression on him.
“We were walking through town and I remember seeing an old lady sweeping the street. I said, ‘Dad, it’s kind of sad that this poor old woman has to do this kind of work.’ He said, ‘No, she has a job, she feels useful, she has a place in our society,'” Joel explained in a 2008 interview with The Republican newspaper.
“I realized they don’t throw old people away like we do here in the States,” he continued. “They give older people a useful place in the bigger picture, and I thought that was a good metaphor for someone my age. You don’t have to cram your whole life into your 20s and 30s to make it, to achieve the American dream, to throw yourself into competition and kill yourself. You have a whole life to live.”
