Touro Law Review Volume 32 Number 1 Symposium: Billy Joel & the Law Article 10 April 2016 Billy Joel and the Practice of Law: Melodies to Which a Lawyer Might Work Randy Lee Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/lawreview Part of the Legal Profession Commons Recommended Citation Lee, Randy (2016) "Billy Joel and the Practice of Law: Melodies to Which a Lawyer Might Work," Touro Law Review: Vol. 32 : No. 1 , Article 10. Available at: https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/lawreview/vol32/iss1/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center. It has been accepted for inclusion in Touro Law Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Touro Law Center. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Lee: Billy Joel and the Practice of Law BILLY JOEL AND THE PRACTICE OF LAW: MELODIES TO WHICH A LAWYER MIGHT WORK Randy Lee* Piano Man has ten tracks.1 The Stranger has nine.2 This work has seven melodies to which a lawyer might work. I. TRACK 1: FROM PIANO BARS TO FIRES (WHY WE HAVE LAWYERS) Fulton Sheen once observed, “[t]he more you look at the clock, the less happy you are.”3 Piano Man4 begins by looking at the clock. “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday.”5 As “[t]he regular crowd shuffles in,” there’s “an old man” chasing a memory, “sad” and “sweet” but elusive and misremembered.6 There are people who pre- fer “loneliness” to “being alone,” people in the wrong place, people out of time, no matter how much time they might have.7 They all show up at the Piano Man’s bar hoping “to forget about life for a while”8 because, as the song reminds us, sometimes people can find themselves in a place where their life is hard to live with.