All for Leyna

“All for Leyna”

Billy Joel (Glass Houses)

This song, in the words of a Vulture review of Joel’s entire catalogue, is a “pretty intense, pretty good stalker song. Electric and well sung, especially on the bridge.” While I could not agree more about the musicality and hook, I disagree about the bit about it being a “stalker song”. 

The song, at its core, is about the narrator’s infatuation with a woman with whom he had a one-night stand. In this case, the narrator is a high-school kid and Leyna is likely one of his first sexual relationships. 

In all likelihood, this is meant to invoke Joel’s hopeless romantic trope which, while I can understand this, makes little sense to me. Rather, to my mind, it is an indictment of an entire culture of “meaningless” flings and the fallout when one party develops romantic attractions to someone they were never intended to seriously entangle with. As such, the angst of Joel’s narrator should be better understood through a lens of infatuation, rather than love, in my opinion.