The song that explains Billy Joel

A ballad from a real time and place

Jul 27, 2025

Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden, 2016.

When Nick Paumgarten profiled Billy Joel for The New Yorker in 2014, the article was headlined: “Thirty-Three-Hit Wonder.”

Those words captured Joel’s position in pop culture: astounding popularity, with scant critical respect. His 33 Top 40 hits are “about twice as many as Springsteen, the Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac,” Paumgarten noted.

Most songwriters would kill to have just one Piano Man or Movin’ Out. But for decades, critics looked down on Joel: Dave Marsh called his work “Self-dramatizing kitsch” and, to Robert Christgau, he was “a force of nature and bad taste.”

But there was another sense in which the headline’s play on “one-hit wonder” seemed right. Billy Joel essentially stopped writing songs in 1993, with some minor exceptions. In the years since, he wrote music in a classical vein and toured occasionally. His jukebox was frozen in time, with no promise of more lyrics to come. He began to look like someone who was lucky enough to catch a wave that was now fast receding.

Then a December 12, 2012 Hurricane Sandy benefit concert at Madison Square Garden showed that Joel could still matter — by performing the hell out of his music even if he didn’t write new songs.

“Here he was on a bill with the Stones, the Who, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul McCartney, and, on this occasion, anyway, and with respect, he was better than all of them,” Paumgarten wrote. “Afterward, Joel felt that he might not be done after all.” That sentiment led to a 10-year residency at the Garden and other sold-out arena and stadium gigs. (Joel recently called off all his concerts as a result of a brain disorder, for which he is receiving treatment.)

Joel’s life story is told in a new and absorbing HBO documentary, “And So It Goes.” The five-hour length might be too much for some casual fans, but it allows time for an ample sampling of Joel’s greatest hits. More significantly, it unravels the stories of his roundabout road to success, troubled childhood, marriages, business and personal struggles, ancestors’ persecution in Nazi Germany, and fruitless effort to develop a warm rapport with his immigrant father, who returned to Europe when Joel was an 8-year-old.

The doc also briefly depicts Joel’s kinship with the waters of Long Island. The house from which he coptered to the Garden for his monthly concerts sits on Center Island, a peninsula that juts into the harbor of Oyster Bay. As a kid, Joel clammed there and worked on an oyster harvesting boat for Frank M. Flower and Sons, Inc., which has farmed the bay since 1887.

Alexa

On the first day of summer, 2019, Joel posted this photo, by Michael Thom, on Twitter/X.

Joel’s boat, the classic 36-foot lobster-swordfish craft “Alexa” is a common sight around the ports of Long Island. According to Soundings Magazine, Joel called it “the best boat I ever had. She can take a rough sea, and she tracks on a good line. She goes fast enough too—she’ll do in the mid-20s. The boat came first, and then the song. I named the boat after my daughter. I’ll always have Alexa.”

Billy Joel isn’t Bob Dylan. Joel’s music is far more accessible — and it’s not going to be lauded by a former Oxford Professor of Poetry and granted a Pulitzer citation and a Nobel Prize. But a lot of thought and feeling went into Joel’s song writing. And perhaps no other song sums that up as well as the one that shares its name with his daughter.

The Downeaster ‘Alexa’ appeared on Joel’s 1989 Storm Front album. As a single, it scored as high as 57 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Mikael Wood, the Los Angeles Times’ pop music critic, recently dissed the song in his ranking of Joel’s hits: “In the watery pantheon of rock songs about boats, this maudlin fisherman’s lament ranks well behind Sailing and Southern Cross (to say nothing of Proud Mary and Sloop John B).”

By contrast, the critic picked another of Joel’s social commentary songs, Allentown, as the eighth best of his works, calling it “a pretty sophisticated critique of the social and political forces converging on a generation of Americans promised prosperity only to find a flag thrown in their face.”

Yet Alexa is every bit as sharp in its commentary as Allentown, and its connection to real life in its locale is much stronger.

As Susan Lacy, co-director of the documentary told TIME, “He's never forgotten where he comes from, and I think that's why people relate to him,” says Lacy. “He has not forgotten that he comes from Hicksville, grew up in Levittown in a hardscrabble life, and it was a long, slow journey to the top for him.”

In the song Alexa, Joel imagines being a commercial fisherman cruising through Block Island Sound toward Nantucket. He left this morning from the “bell in Gardiner’s Bay,” the red/white buoy at the entrance to Three Mile Harbor on Long Island’s South Fork.

“Like all the locals here I’ve had to sell my home,” Joel sings. “Too proud to leave, I work my fingers to the bone…I got bills to pay and children who need clothes. I know there’s fish out there, but where God only knows. They say these waters aren’t what they used to be. But I got people back on land who count on me.”

He has to venture farther from shore in search of fish “since they told me I can’t sell no stripers. And there’s no luck in swordfishing here. I was a bayman like my father was before. Can’t make a living as a bayman anymore. There ain’t much future for a man who works the sea. But there ain’t no island left for islanders like me.”

Itzhak Perlman plays the song’s violin solo, and joined Joel for one of his Madison Square Garden performances.

The back story

The Downeaster Alexa didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a centuries-old fishing community that fed and clothed the people of the South Fork long before it became internationally known as the Hamptons resort area.

In 1986, Peter Matthiessen, a charter boat captain turned author, wrote Men’s Lives, a book paying tribute to the obstinate men of the rapidly disappearing fishing industry.

“Full-time baymen — there are scarcely 100 left on the South Fork — must also be competent boatmen, net men, carpenters, and mechanics, and most could make good money at a trade but they value independence over security, preferring to work on their own schedule, responsible only to their own families. Protective of their freedom to the point of stubbornness, wishing only to be left alone, they have never asked for and never received direct subsidies from town or county, state or federal government.”

They didn’t get unemployment insurance or get paid when they were sick, Matthiessen noted.

“Yet every year they find themselves taxed harder for boats and trailers, trucks and gasoline shellfish digging and fish shipping licenses, docking license, scallop opening license, permits to take certain species (shellfish, lobster, striped bass).”

They faced competition from politically influential sports fishermen, particularly for striped bass, one of the most prized species in the region.

The commercial fishermen objected to rules limiting their ability to take stripers. The “most imperiled” by those rules were the haul seiners. “In haul-seining, a net-filled dory is launched through the open surf, an enterprise that, on a rough Atlantic day, demands nerve and experience as well as skill. Without the striped bass, haul-seining is unlikely to survive, and the end of this fishery will mean the end of a surf boat tradition that began when the Atlantic Coast was still the American frontier.”

“Most of the surfmen come from the main fishing clans which descend from the farmer fishermen and the offshore whalers of centuries ago. In recent decades, most fishing families have been forced to sell off land that had been in the family for generations. Those who were left subsist in the less poor corners of a community in which they were once the leading citizens.”

The fishermen “are tough, resourceful, self respecting and also (some say) hidebound and cranky.”

“Their children can no longer afford to live where their families have harvested the sea and land for 300 years,” wrote Matthiessen. “These South Fork baymen — old-time Americans who still speak with the Kentish and Dorset inflections of Elizabethan England — may soon become rare relics from the past like the Atlantic right whales, a cow and calf, that in the winter of 1984 to 1985 have been appearing here and there off the ocean beach.”

Death of an industry

Matthiessen’s prediction soon came to pass. As Tom Clavin reported for the New York Times, “in 1990, acting in response to complaints from Long Island sportfishing groups that the commercial fishermen were taking in too many bass and other fish, the state's Department of Environmental Conservation banned haul-seining altogether and limited each baymen to 100 bass annually. The dory-towing trucks that prowled 25 miles of South Fork ocean beaches disappeared, and with them went a way of life.”

There was one last gasp for the haul seiners. In July, 1992, with 1,000 spectators cheering, 20 baymen used a dory and net to illegally catch more than 400 pounds of striped bass. Billy Joel, who had been inspired by Matthiessen’s book and had donated the proceeds of the song Alexa to the baymen, was there at the final haul seine, photographed holding a striper above his head.

With his then-wife Christie Brinkley, Joel was very much part of the celebrity invasion of the Hamptons, a fact that helped bring house prices there to dizzying heights. But unlike many newcomers, the singer had an intuitive understanding of his fellow Long Islanders.

Joel recalled his time as a clammer and oysterman. ''A young person could do that,'' he told Diane Ketcham, of the Times. ''Rather than work for a boss, you could go out and make money by finding one of Long Island's natural resources. I can't accept that Long Islanders won't be able to do that anymore…”

“The baymen have been here since Colonial times. They were the original pioneers of this Island. I realized I had been a bayman, too, although I didn't know it had a name. I was just a guy doing his gig.''