There is also a lot of inside stuff on the song. In a lot of these older places in the world, they value their older people and their older people feel they can still be a part of the community and I thought 'This is a terrific idea – that old people are useful -and that means I don’t have to worry so much about getting old because I can still have a use in this world in my old age. We put them in rest homes, we kinda kick them under the rug and make believe they don’t exist. We treat old people in this country pretty badly. I say to my father “What’s this nice old lady doing sweeping the street?” He says “She’s got a job, she feels useful, she’s happy, she’s making the street clean, she’s not put out to pasture”. She must have been about 90 years old and she is sweeping the street. So I go to visit my father in Vienna, I’m walking around this town and I see this old lady.
It was a place where cultures co-mingled. You get great beer in Vienna but you also get brandy from Armenia.
It’s a place of inter…course, of exchange – it’s the place where cultures co-mingle. So the metaphor of Vienna has the meaning of a crossroad. During the Cold War, between the Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact nations and the NATO countries was the city of Vienna… Vienna was always the crossroads – between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. He lives in Vienna, Austria which I thought was rather bizarre because he left Germany in the first place because of this guy named Hitler and he ends up going to the same place that Hitler hung out all those years! Vienna, for a long time was the crossroads.
I didn’t see him from the time I was 8 ‘till I was about 23-24 years old.
Why did I pick Vienna to use as a metaphor for the rest of your life? My father lives in Vienna now. In a July 2008 New York Times article, Joel cited this as one of his two favorite songs, along with “Summer, Highland Falls”.
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