33 Days of Music - Day 9: A song by my favorite artist
Billy Joel is my favorite artist, of all time, hands down. "Miami 2017" is a special song to me. Iit gets me a little emotional. It was performed at a benefit/memorial concert following the 9/11 attacks and he said, "I wrote that song 25 years ago. I thought it was going to be a science fiction song. I never thought it would really happen. But unlike the end of that song, we ain't going anywhere."
He played it again for a Hurricane Sandy relief concert with modified lyrics:
I've seen the lights go out on Broadway.
I saw the Empire State laid low.
The storm went on beyond the Palisades,
out in The Rockaways the oceans overflowed.
We held a concert out in Brooklyn to watch the island bridges blow.
We shut our power down, Staten Island drowned,
But we went right on with the show.
I listened to it a lot when I was in NYC, because I was working at the Office of Emergency Management and Sandy relief was my every day. There are a lot of Billy Joel songs that pull at my heart. "Leningrad," "Downeaster Alexa," "She's Got a Way," it's a pretty long list. This one was a science fiction song when I was younger. When I went to my first Billy Joel concert it was maybe 1998. I lived to see a time when it's played at memorial and relief concerts. I don't know how I feel about that.
"Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" - Billy Joel
Seen the lights go out on Broadway, I saw the Empire State laid low.
And life went on beyond the Palisades.
They all bought Cadillacs, and left there long ago.
They held a concert out in Brooklyn to watch the island bridges blow.
They turned our power down, and drove us underground,
But we went right on with the show.
I've seen the lights go out on Broadway. I saw the ruins at my feet.
You know we almost didn't notice it?
We'd seen it all the time on 42nd Street.
They burned the churches up in Harlem like in the Spanish civil war.
The flames were ev'rywhere, but no one really cared; it always burned up there before.