The Biggest Revelations in HBO’s Billy Joel Documentary

Billy Joel, 76, who boasts 33 top 40 hits and five Grammy Awards, has had an expansive and exciting life, which comes into focus in a new documentary, And So It Goes.

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Directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, two-part HBO doc will put viewers in a Billy Joel state of mind. Named after Joel’s favorite of his songs, it features all of the Long Island native’s greatest hits—more than 110 of the 121 songs in his catalog—and highlights the songs that catapulted him to new heights in his career like “Just the Way You Are,” “Piano Man,” “Captain Jack,” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

In addition to numerous family photos and home videos, viewers will see the rocker sitting for interviews at his home piano and rehearsing for his Madison Square Garden residency. There is never-before-seen footage of Joel playing “Piano Man” at Columbia Records the day he signed with the label. His four wives, daughter Alexa, and half-brother Alex, a conductor, share family stories, while entertainment execs and musicians like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and P!nk talk about Joel’s impact on rock ‘n’ roll.

“He didn’t actually see the film ’til it was finished, and we’re really proud of that,” Lacy says. “It’s an independently-made film.”

Here’s a look at the most notable moments in And So It Goes.   

The women who inspired Billy Joel

All three Billy Joel’s ex-wives sit down for interviews in this doc series, and they speak highly of their relationships with him.

And So It Goes features the first interview in 40 years with Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth Weber, an early muse, who helped launch his career by picking “Just the Way You Are” for one of his first albums The Stranger. It went on to win two Grammy Awards, and Paul McCartney says in the series that he has always wished that he had written that song. She worked as his manager until they parted ways in 1982, the same year he survived a motorcycle accident that shed light on his reckless behavior and drinking.

“I love Bill, I always will,” she says. “We together were greater than the sum of the parts, and I am really proud of that.”

His second wife, the model Christie Brinkley, made his music video for “Uptown Girl” a hit, as she sashayed through a gas station while Joel, dressed as a gas station attendant, chased her. “It was fun to have a whirlwind romance and certain aspects of that turn into music,” she says. They were one of the biggest celebrity couples of their time and were known for striking dramatic poses for the paparazzi. They had one daughter, Alexa Joel—who is also a singer—but Brinkley says Joel became difficult to live with because he didn’t remember the things he did while he was drinking.

His third wife, Katie Lee Biegel, a 23-year-old chef whom he married in 2004, got him to go to a Betty Ford rehab program after giving him an ultimatum. In the doc, she says their age difference ended up making them incompatible. She wanted to go out to all of the parties that Joel was invited to, and Joel wanted to stay home. “I wanted to do all of the things together, but I guess that’s where our age came into play,” she says. “Also I think that there was always a little bit of resentment that I had pushed him to go to Betty Ford.”

Joel has been married to Alexis Roderick, who worked at Morgan Stanley, since 2015. He was in retirement mode when they met, cooking salmon teriyaki for her when she got home from work. In the doc, he talks about playing the piano for Alexis as his way of wooing her, but she seemed unimpressed, and he was relieved that she was interested in him as a person versus him as a performer. They have two young children. “After years of learning and personal growth, my kids have the most amazing version of him,” Alexis says. 

“He has a history of very strong women being in his life,” says Levin, citing the fact that he was raised by a single mother and chose two women to direct And So It Goes.

Billy Joel’s search for his father

Throughout the doc series And So It Goes, Joel talks about all of the time he spent trying to track down his father, Howard Joel, who walked out on his family in the 1950s. 

He found his father in Vienna in the early 1970s, when Joel was in his 20s. There, he also got to know his half-brother Alex, a classical music composer, who appears in And So It Goes. Howard Joel even joined Billy Joel on stage at a concert in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1995.

Still, his father remained remote and distant. “We never really made a strong connection,” Billy Joel says in And So It Goes. He describes his dad as “the missing link” in his life. And yet, he forgave his father for not being present in his life. When he died in 2011, he “kind of freaked out,” thinking, “He’s gone, and I’ll never get to know him. I had no animosity towards him.”

As Alexa Joel explains, “It broke his heart a little bit that his father didn’t come to him—he had to go to Vienna. He was always looking for that deeper connection.” However, she says he did find it through his brother Alex who is a conductor.

In 2001, he recorded a classical album with pianist Hyung-Ki Joo as one way to pay tribute to his father’s love of classical music. As the commentator, Howard Stern, says in And So It Goes, “I think his drive comes from wanting to know his father through music.”

Given his distant relationship with his own father, he has vowed to be a more involved father with the two young daughters he has through Alexis Roderick Joel. He’s focused not on writing and recording at this stage in life, but on being the best dad he can be. As he puts it, “These are things I missed. I want to make sure they don’t miss it.” 

The stories behind Billy Joel classics

“Even for people who know the songs and sing along, they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, okay. Now I know where Billy was in his life at that time, and why he was writing that song,” Levin says.

As Joel describes his approach to song-writing, “I don’t dwell in a lot of metaphor and simile. I write like I talk.” 

He wrote send-ups of the music industry. He wrote “Piano Man” when he was trying to make ends meet and playing piano at a bar called Executive Lounge in Los Angeles, and “The Entertainer” was even more meta, about putting out “Piano Man” and “kvetching about having a hit record in the music business,” as Joel puts it. 

Many of Joel’s songs are autobiographical. “Vienna” is inspired by his journey to meet his dad in Vienna, Austria. “New York State of Mind” is inspired by the red and gold-colored trees he saw on a bus trip en route to a rental house in the Hudson Valley. Thankfully, there was a piano in the house, and he says he “ran upstairs to the piano, wrote this song probably within about an hour. It just came out.”

Some of his most famous songs are about being head over heels in love. 

“She’s Got a Way” is about his love for his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, and “The Longest Time” is about dating Christie Brinkley, while the song that the series is named after, “And So It Goes,” is about relationships ending.

“True love isn’t always floating on clouds and ecstasy. A lot of it is pain,” he says in the series. “It’s got a sour note in almost every chord…It’s sort of like the end of a romance, no resolution, which is terrifying to consider. That’s why I wrote it.” 

He wrote “Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel)” for his daughter, Alexa, so she’d know he would always be there for her. It’s bittersweet for Alexa, who is moved that her father loved her so much to write a song about her, but it was also written at a time when his drinking was out of control, and his marriage to her mother, Christie Brinkley, was disintegrating.

“If there was a skeleton key to unlocking what’s behind the songs, it would probably be my relationships with others,” Joel explains. “Everything I write is influenced by someone else.” 

A little bit of trivia from the directors that’s not in the doc: “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which rattles off the names of newsmakers, was inspired by a conversation that Joel had with John Lennon’s son Sean Lennon. As Lacy explains: “Sean said, ‘yeah, yeah, you guys are so lucky nothing had happened in your life. Look all the things that we have to deal with.’ And Billy was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Billy Joel today

These days, Joel has a mansion in Florida, where he lives with his wife Alexis Roderick and their two young daughters. He loves to take out his boat Alexa, named after his first-born daughter. Boating is “freedom,” he says, because “you’ve left the land and you are on your own. You’re navigating, you’re controlling where you’re going—so you’ve got to always be in control, and there’s something exhilarating about that. I am in control. I am the captain of my ship, against all the forces of nature. It’s a strong feeling, it’s very powerful. It’s healing.” 

In May 2025, the New York Times reported that he cancelled all of his upcoming concerts after being diagnosed with a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus, which affects his hearing, vision, and balance. He is currently recovering from a surgery and taking a break from performing. 

“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.”

Now he has had more time to reflect on his career, and And So It Goes is a product of that. 

“I think music saved my life,” Joel says in the doc. “It gave me a reason to live.” Alexa said her father would always say to her, “if you do what you love, then you’ll love what you do. That’s really the secret to life. I think, for him, through all the sadness and all of the struggles that he went through, he was still doing what he loved and that’s really what kept him going, kept the music coming.”

Joel acknowledges he has his faults in And So It Goes, explaining, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’ve grown from them. I’ve learned from them.” 

The series ends with him playing “And So It Goes” on a Steinway and reflecting on how he still sees himself as a work in progress: 

“I’m not finished. I’m as lost as everybody else. I’m still searching. I may not ever figure it all out, but I’m trying.”