Anyone who knows me will tell you that music is one of my passions. Music helps to calm me down, to cheer me up, it helps me think, and it helps me to unwind after a long and stressful day. Now you might be wondering how writing headlines and music have anything in common, and hopefully I can explain it here.
Billy Joel is one of my favorite musicians. I know more about him and his music than is probably healthy for a person to know.
If you are a Billy Joel fan, you will know that he was born and raised in New York, and is as pro New York as a person ever has been. Well, early on in his career, Joel had to relocate to California for several years to wait out a bad contract that he had signed with a record label and to try and reinvent himself as an artist.
In 1975, towards the end of Joel's time in California, he picked up a newspaper with a front page headline of "Ford to City: Drop Dead". The city being referred to in the headline was New York, which was in the midst of a financial crisis of epic proportions and had asked the Federal Government to bail them out, which prompted President Gerald Ford to say essentially "Drop Dead".
Joel saw this headline and told himself that if New York was going down in flames then he was going to be there to burn with the city. He moved back to New York and ended up writing "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway) which has turned out to be one of his most widely known songs. The song takes its inspiration from this newspaper headline and paints the picture of an armageddon hitting New York and what it would be like to be there and see it happen.
Remember this story the next time you complain about writing a headline, because you never know if one of your favorite musicians will use it as inspiration for one of their best songs.
If you're interested, here's the song.
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