1976 · Behind the Songs
In 1975, a homesick Billy Joel imagined New York in ruins and set the story forty years ahead. A quarter century later, the fantasy turned painfully real.
In the spring of 1976, Billy Joel closed his fourth studio album with a song about the end of the world. “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)” runs just over five minutes and ends Turnstiles on a note of spectacular ruin: a narrator, decades in the future, telling his grandchildren how the lights went out on Broadway and New York City fell apart. Joel later described the piece as a “science fiction song,” a fantasy written from three thousand miles away by a New Yorker who missed home and feared his city was dying. He could not have known that twenty-five years later he would sing it on a stage built for mourning, and the fantasy would feel like memory.
A city on the brink
The song was written in 1975, during one of the darkest chapters in New York’s modern history. The city was effectively broke, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and its pleas for federal help were famously rebuffed. In October 1975 the Daily News summed up the moment with a headline that became legend: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Municipal services were being slashed, crime was climbing, and a sense of doom hung over the five boroughs. Joel, born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, was living in Los Angeles at the time, watching the crisis unfold from across the country with a mixture of guilt, grief, and disbelief.
Distance sharpened his feelings. In California, Joel was surrounded by sunshine, but his thoughts kept drifting back east. He has said the idea arrived as a kind of dark daydream: what if the decline everyone predicted actually happened? What if New York didn’t recover — what if it collapsed entirely? The title’s “Miami 2017” came from a specific observation: so many retired New Yorkers relocated to Florida that Joel imagined a future in which the city’s exiles would gather in Miami and tell stories about the place they had lost. The narrator is one of those exiles, an old man in 2017 remembering the catastrophe for children who never saw the city in its glory.
Building the apocalypse in the studio
Joel recorded the song for Turnstiles, the album he made after returning to New York. The sessions took place at Ultra Sonic Studio in Hempstead, Long Island, with Joel himself producing. At five minutes and twelve seconds, “Miami 2017” was the longest and most ambitious track on the record, a progressive-rock mini-epic full of shifting dynamics: quiet, almost tender verses swelling into thunderous choruses, with Joel’s piano driving the structure like an engine. It was a deliberate showpiece, the kind of song designed to close an album — and a concert — with maximum force.
Turnstiles arrived in May 1976 to a lukewarm commercial reception, but the closing track stood out immediately. It was too strange and too long to be a single, yet it had a cinematic sweep that made it unforgettable. Fans who saw Joel live in those years often cite it as the emotional peak of the show — the moment the piano man stopped being a saloon singer and became a prophet. The drama comes from restraint as much as bombast: the verses are conversational, almost casual, which makes the choruses hit like a wave.
When fiction became reality
For a quarter century, “Miami 2017” remained what Joel intended: a fantasy, a thought experiment, a love letter disguised as a disaster movie. Then came September 11, 2001. Just over a month after the attacks, Joel took the stage at The Concert for New York City, the benefit held at Madison Square Garden on October 20, 2001, and played the song for a city living through its own version of the apocalypse he had imagined. Introducing it, he said: “I wrote that song 25 years ago. I thought it was going to be a science fiction song.” The pause that followed said everything.
The performance was devastating. Lines that had once sounded like pulp fiction — about fires, evacuations, and a skyline gone dark — now landed as plain description. The audience, full of firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers, heard their own story in a song written before most of them were born. Joel has returned to it at other moments of civic crisis since: he played it at the 12-12-12 benefit for Hurricane Sandy relief in 2012, and during the COVID-19 pandemic he performed it for the “Rise Up New York” broadcast in 2020, with the lights of the Empire State Building pulsing in sync. Each time, the song absorbed new grief without breaking.
A life on the road
Long before 2001, “Miami 2017” had become a concert staple and a live-album fixture. The version most fans know best opens Songs in the Attic (1981), captured at Madison Square Garden in June 1980 — a roof-raising performance that presents the song at its most anthemic. It reappeared on Live at Yankee Stadium (1990) and 12 Gardens Live (2006), and Joel rewrote some lyrics for “Last Play at Shea” (2008), tailoring the apocalypse to the closing of Shea Stadium and the Mets. He has played it on television too, including a 1978 appearance on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test and at Carnegie Hall during the 30th-anniversary celebration of The Stranger.
Covers, stages, and critical respect
“Miami 2017” was never a hit single, but it earned the respect of Joel’s peers and critics. Richard Marx recorded a cover in 1993, releasing it as a bonus track on international editions of his album Paid Vacation. The song also had a brush with Broadway: it appeared in the original Chicago production of Movin’ Out, the dance musical built around Joel’s catalog, though it was cut before the show reached New York. Critics have singled it out across the decades — Rolling Stone’s Timothy White praised it in 1981, and the legendary New York DJ Carol Miller chose it as a landmark during her WNEW-FM farewell broadcast in 1999.
What to listen for
Put on the Turnstiles version and notice how Joel the producer builds the track like a film score. The opening is all atmosphere — low piano figures and gathering dread — before the band crashes in with the force of a collapsing building. Listen for how his vocal shifts between the intimate storyteller of the verses and the full-throated preacher of the choruses; it is the same trick he uses in “Piano Man,” scaled up to apocalyptic size. And pay attention to the ending, which doesn’t fade so much as smolder. Fifty years on, “Miami 2017” remains the most audacious thing Billy Joel ever recorded — a science-fiction song that history kept trying to turn into journalism.