 NEW YORK (AP) - Twenty-five-year-old songs don't often get second lives, but Billy Joel's 1976 track "New York State Of Mind" has been enjoying new prominence during the past four months. Interest in the song was rekindled after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers, and Joel performed the song 10 days later on the America: A Tribute To Heroes telethon and again at the October 20 Concert For New York City at Madison Square Garden. Now, a duet of the song he recorded last year with Tony Bennett has been nominated for a Grammy Award for best pop collaboration with vocals. If they win, it will be Joel's sixth Grammy and Bennett's 10th, not including the lifetime-achievement awards both have received. Joel tells that the original impetus for the song was another New York crisis-this time in the mid-'70s, when the city looked to then-President Gerald Ford and the U.S. Congress to provide assistance. "I remember when I wrote the song. It was during the time that New York was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy-it looked like the city was gonna default-and the feds basically told New York to drop dead. There was a famous (New York) Daily News headline-I think it said, 'Ford To New York: Drop Dead'-and I was living in California at the time. I lived in L.A. for three years, and that was the thing that decided me to go back to New York, because there was a certain amount of, of happiness in the L.A. community that New York was having so many problems," he says. Joel and Bennett have reportedly been invited to perform the song together during the Grammy ceremony at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 27.
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