Billy Joel's got a few piano ballads that express sadness and/or longing and/or loss--and if we're talking about piano ballads in general, sadness and/or longing and/or loss is pretty well-covered territory. I don't think "And So It Goes" uncovers any revolutionary insight in terms of breakup songs. But this is one of the saddest fucking songs in the universe.
Sometimes resignation is a good thing in such a situation--it's how you get closure, and know you can move on. Not here. In "And So It Goes," the resignation comes while knowing that nothing could've been done to prevent it. "So I would choose to be with you / That's if the choice were mine to make / But you can make decisions too / And you can have this heart to break" is such a powerful verse because it covers all the emotional bases--there's nothing to be done to save the relationship, and there's no comfort to be had in the relationship ending and being able to move on. Nor is there any realistic way to lessen the emotional impact of the breakup by saying "Nah, I never liked her that much anyway," because lying to yourself doesn't make you feel better. It's an acknowledgement that she doesn't like you back, and there's nothing you can do except to sit there and wear it until you don't feel sad anymore.
Suffice it to say I felt a deep connection with this song when I was a teenager.
The other thing that makes "And So It Goes" so great (and this isn't one of those where I might acknowledge that it's lame or corny but I like it anyway--I truly believe this is a Good Song) is that the lyrics fit so well with the rhythm of the melody. (I'll probably repeat parts of this rant about 60 songs up the list, when we get to one of only a few songs that does this better.) One of my biggest pet peeves is when a line doesn't match up with the erstwhile rhythm of the melody and you get filler syllables or the stress of the words being sung don't match the accented notes on the vocal melody.
This is why sung-through musicals suck, by and large. Because the secret to good writing is editing, so when you've got two write three straight hours' worth of music (as opposed to 15 or 20 distinct songs), the quality is going to suffer just because you're diluting the quality of the music with filler. Not only that but when you use music to carry most of your dialogue, the dialogue either won't fit or is jumbled around to service its insertion into a "melody" that's often as not just one note that doesn't fit into any cohesive musical theme beyond "I think we should make everyone sing all the time because maybe if we have people to stop and talk from time to time, our musical won't suck ass."
This is why, when I left RENT, the sadness I felt when Angel died was dwarfed by the sadness I felt when the second act started and I hadn't.
Anyway, the lyrics to "And So It Goes" dictate the vocal melody, which actually turns out to be good despite the lyrics reading more or less like a monologue. This is such a hard trick to pull off--or at least I assume it is, because if it wasn't hard, I feel like songwriters would be better at it.
