This monster hit of a song was created in 1989, when Joel turned 40. The idea spawned from a conversation he had with a friend of Sean Lennon. The friend just turned 21 and was complaining about how crazy it was to be living in his era, therefore undermining any other time before his. This encouraged Joel to write a song that would prove that any time is filled with extremes.
You can read my sequence overview below, or you can click to download the full We Didn't Start the Fire article, in which I also discuss how the lesson.
Starting from 1949 (the year in which he was born), he chronicled the major events that occurred during that time in a rapid fire delivery of names, places, and cultural works.
These are his words on the subject:
I started doing that as a mental exercise. I had turned forty. It was 1989, and I said, “Okay, what’s happened in my life? I wrote down the year 1949… It was kind of a mind game. [It’s] one of the few times I’ve written the lyrics first, which should be obvious to why I usually prefer to write the music first, because the melody is horrendous. It’s like a mosquito droning. It’s one of the worst melodies I’ve ever written. I kind of like the lyric though.
Passage taken from the book, In Their Own Words by Bill DeMain (Chapter 14) where he interviewed Joel about his thoughts on the song.
We Didn't Start The Fire Ashes Download
The song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a radio mainstay.