"Only the Good Die Young"

Come out, Virginia.  Don't let me wait.

You Catholic girls start much too late.

Aww, but sooner or later it comes down to fate.

I might as well be the one.

Some people have branded this song as “anti-Catholic.”

Billy Joel, on the other hand, describes it as “pro-lust.”

At the time he recorded “Only the Good Die Young,” Billy asked the guys in his band, a couple of whom were Catholic, what they thought.

“Do you have a problem with this?” he asked.

“No,” they said, “it’s true.”

One of our Facebook followers once told me that “Notre Dame University never let [Billy] Joel play there for many years because of [this next] song.  But they finally relented sometime in the later ‘80s.  [And once he was onstage, Billy Joel made sure he played] the song four times during the concert.”

Joel once told an interviewer, “When there was all this brouhaha, I was like ‘What's the problem? In the end the girl kept her virginity.”