Music
Why Fans Still Love Billy Joel’s Most Heartbreaking Ballad
Billy Joel’s ‘And So It Goes’ remains one of his most emotionally devastating ballads, capturing heartbreak with quiet resignation that fans say hits harder than any other song.
More than 35 years after Billy Joel released “And So It Goes,” fans still say the heartbreaking ballad hits harder than almost anything else in his catalog. For many listeners, the song feels less like a breakup ballad and more like emotional devastation set to music.
Joel is known for many of his hits like “Uptown Girl,” “Piano Man,” and “She’s Always a Woman.” However, many longtime fans say that “And So It Goes” is the song that hurts the most.
Released in 1989, “And So It Goes” showed a vulnerable side of the rock star that listeners don’t hear in many of his other hits. Unlike many other dramatic breakup anthems, “And So It Goes” captures something quieter. Listeners hear the sadness of accepting that love is lost, even when part of you still wishes it had worked.
Joel told Howard Stern in 2024 that “And So It Goes” came from a period when his “heart was broken.” He explained that he knew the lyrics had to be about heartbreak, noting, “even the chords have a dissonant note in them.”
While Joel has never definitively confirmed the inspiration for the song, fans have long speculated it was inspired by his relationship with supermodel Elle Macpherson.
The quiet, emotional resignation Joel sings about is part of why fans still find “And So It Goes” so devastating.
Several years ago, a fan shared in the Billy Joel subreddit that they watched him perform the song during a concert at Madison Square Garden. They had never heard the song before, and wrote that they would never listen to it again.
“Listening to BJ sing that song is probably one of the greatest moments of my life,” they shared. The fan continued, “I cried (and I rarely cry while listening to music). I don’t want to listen to that song again for fear of losing that experience,” they added.
One fan on Facebook recalled, “This song came close to me when I was heartbroken and alone, locked in a dark room. Thank you, Billy.”
A fan on Reddit described the song as “another song with this heavy emotional weight to it, the sort of sad resignation that just leaves you feeling … kinda empty inside.”
“I can’t think of any other song by any other artist that evokes such emotion. This one gets me every time,” another fan said of the song once.
More than three decades later, “And So It Goes” still feels painfully personal to listeners who have lived through heartbreak themselves. For many fans, it is not just Joel’s saddest song. It is the one song they return to that captures heartbreak the best.
