Song Information
The song was inspired by a high school crush of Billy Joel's, Virginia Callahan. The boy/narrator believes that the girl is refusing him because she comes from a religious Catholic family and that she believes sex before marriage is sinful. He sings,
- "You Catholic girls start much too late,
- but sooner or later it comes down to fate.
- I might as well be the one."
Perceived as "anti-Catholic", the song was banned by many radio stations. "When I wrote 'Only the Good Die Young', the point of the song wasn't so much anti-Catholic as pro-lust," Joel told Performing Songwriter magazine. "The minute they banned it, the album started shooting up the charts." In a 2008 interview, Joel also pointed out one part of the lyrics that virtually all the critics missed – the man in the song failed to get anywhere with the girl, and she kept her chastity.
Read more about this topic: Only The Good Die Young
Famous quotes containing the words song and/or information:
“Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)