Perhaps I understood this because my mother always spoke about the song in such glowing terms (it was her favorite on the album), but I suspect not. Of course, I lacked the terms by which to understand it, but I seemed to know that “Leningrad” was a song that told a story with a clear dramatic structure, that it hinged on two contrasting narrative viewpoints, that it had roundness, political themes, a strong sense of humanity that it managed all this inside the limitations of a rhyme scheme and a scaffolding of verse-verse-chorus, verse-chorus-verse. I didn’t just connect with its melody, the way I had with other memorable songs: I admired it for the skill of its construction, the depths it held, the way the music and lyrics informed each other. When I first heard it, I was eight years old, and I’d never experienced a song quite like it. It tells the story of Viktor, a boy raised in the Soviet Union at the same time as Joel himself was growing up in McCarthy-era America, and how the two of them went on to meet as adults in Leningrad (“ He made my daughter laugh and we embraced / We never knew what friends we had until we came to Leningrad”). “Leningrad” is one of several Billy Joel songs that toe the line between artful sentimentality and roll-your-eyes corniness. A reverential silence would fall between us. As soon as we reached “Leningrad,” my nausea would ease, and the world outside the window would dissolve. I’d get carsick in the back while we meandered through the countryside of West Lancashire. We’d be on the way to my grandmother’s house, taking the convoluted scenic route. There was no rewinding or fast-forwarding: we’d re-join the album at the point where she’d last left it, usually halfway through one of its more turgid tracks (“That’s Not Her Style” or “When in Rome”).
She’d remove my dad’s cassette tape of Soft Metal from the stereo as soon as we got in the car and replace it with Storm Front.
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