Songfacts®:

• Billy Joel wrote the lyrics to "Tomorrow Is Today" during the lowest point of his life. His heavy metal organ duo, Attila, had just collapsed after his affair with Elizabeth Weber, the wife of his bandmate and best friend, Jon Small, came to light. Small kicked Joel out of the apartment they had been sharing, leaving Joel broke, homeless, separated from his closest friend, and convinced his music career was dead.
  
  Desperate and depressed, Joel penned the words to "Tomorrow Is Today" on a sheet of loose-leaf paper as a suicide note before attempting to take his own life by drinking furniture polish. Jon Small found Joel, rushed him to the hospital to have his stomach pumped, and saved his life. Joel spent time in a hospital's psychiatric ward following the incident before eventually regrouping.
  
  Joel and Small managed to repair their friendship over time. Small moved into video production, directing iconic music videos for artists like Run-D.M.C. and Garth Brooks, as well as filming several of Joel's major concert films.
  
  Joel and Elizabeth Weber eventually married in 1973, with Weber managing Joel's early solo career during his breakout year. They divorced in 1982.
• "I was really depressed at the time I wrote that," Joel told Sirius XM in 2016. "I was 21, and I was just bummed out. When you're that age, you're going from adolescence into adulthood. You become so self-absorbed that your head can literally go up your ass, and you gotta pull it out 'cause if you stay there too long, it's not a good atmosphere. It's a very self-pitying song. I actually rarely go back to that album and listen to that. Although the lyric was meaningful to me at the time, now from this perspective, I can say, 'What did he know, he's 21.'"
• This is from Joel's debut solo album, Cold Spring Harbor, which was named after a hamlet in Huntington, New York, near Joel's hometown on Long Island. The album cover was shot at Harbor Road in Cold Spring Harbor.
• Joel signed a bad deal with Family Productions, owned by music executive Arthur Ripp, that held him to a 10-album contract that stripped him of all the publishing rights to his current and future songs. Joel was only able to sign with Columbia Records if his albums still bore the Family Productions name and Ripp was guaranteed royalties on sales of Joel's records. Ripp finally relented and sold the publishing rights to CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff, who then gave them to Joel as a birthday present.
  
  The Bridge was the last Joel album to bear the Family Productions logo and features the scathing track "Getting Closer," which was inspired by the ordeal.
• A mastering error resulted in Joel's vocals sounding unnaturally higher in places throughout the album, which the singer compared to the chirpy voices of Alvin & The Chipmunks. (The Chipmunks actually went on to cover some of Joel's tunes, including "Uptown Girl" and "You May Be Right.")
  
  When Joel threw a listening party for his friends to hear the album, they all laughed at his high-pitched voice. The singer was so incensed, he ripped the record off the turntable and tossed it out in the street.
• Joel revisited the topic of suicide in the 1985 song "You're Only Human (Second Wind)" to reassure teens, in particular, that mistakes are natural and life is worth living.