{"id":283505,"date":"2026-01-14T07:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T07:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/283505\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T07:44:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T07:44:13","slug":"billy-idol-on-oscar-shortlisted-tune-dying-to-live-from-doc-about-his-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/283505\/","title":{"rendered":"Billy Idol on Oscar-Shortlisted Tune ‘Dying to Live’ From Doc About His Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBilly Idol<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s heyday may have been the 1980s, but he has never gone away. The English punk-turned-rock singer\/songwriter \u2014 a three-time Grammy nominee who was a key part of the MTV-driven \u201cSecond British Invasion\u201d of America, with hits including \u201cDancing with Myself,\u201d \u201cWhite Wedding,\u201d \u201cCradle of Love,\u201d \u201cEyes Without a Face,\u201d \u201cTo Be a Lover\u201d and a chart-topping cover of \u201cMony Mony\u201d \u2014\u00a0is now 70, a grandfather and leading a much quieter life than he did during his hard-partying days. But his spiky blonde hair, trademark sneer and seductive voice are all still there. And the last five years have included as many wins for him as any such stretch.<\/p>\n

\n\tIndeed, since the darkest days of the pandemic,\u00a0when \u201cDancing with Myself\u201d experienced a resurgence in popularity (for obvious reasons), he has released two EPs (2021\u2019s The Roadside and 2022\u2019s The Cage) and a studio album (his first in 11 years, 2025\u2019s Dream Into It); toured North America with old pal Joan Jett<\/strong>; and collaborated with ardent admirer Miley Cyrus<\/strong> on \u201cNight Crawling,\u201d a song on her 2020 album Plastic Hearts. He was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023 and nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2025. And now, in the 50th year of his career, he is, for the first time, shortlisted for an Oscar \u2014\u00a0best original song \u2014 for \u201cDying to Live,\u201d a reflective ballad that he co-wrote with Oscar-nominated songwriter J. Ralph<\/strong> to play over the closing montage of Jonas Akerulund<\/strong>\u2019s documentary Billy Idol Should Be Dead<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring a conversation at Idol\u2019s home high in the Hollywood Hills, on a spacious property that he has owned since moving from New York to L.A. in 1988, he discussed the doc, the song and the feeling of being Oscar-shortlisted. Excerpts of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity and brevity, follow.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn why he decided to cooperate with the documentary starting in 2019\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAs you get into your 60s and 70s, you have a vantage point that you didn\u2019t have before, and you can see the landscape of your life, really, and you\u2019re in a position to look at it and quantify it and be able to talk about that in a serious way, which you maybe couldn\u2019t have done earlier in your life because you just weren\u2019t far enough along the road. And I think that\u2019s what happened. It just made sense to do a documentary. And also we started to think about the fact you want to capture people while they\u2019re still here. My dad had died in 2014, and then my mom passed on in 2020, so we just got her in the documentary. There were things like that that were starting to happen that were making you realize, \u2018If we really want to capture people while they\u2019re still here, this is the moment to do a documentary,\u2019 and a serious one, one with gravitas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the inspiration for the song \u201cDying to Live\u201d\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe created a montage piece towards the end of the documentary, before the credits, kind of almost in short-form showing you what you\u2019ve just watched. What we didn\u2019t have was music to go along with it. In the rest of the documentary, you\u2019ve seen my life, but now we wanted you to feel what I went through, and we came up with \u2018Dying to Live.\u2019 When I met Josh Ralph, it made sense that we might do it with a string quartet, which I\u2019d never done before; I had had some orchestral instrumentation on Kings and Queens of the Underground, an album I\u2019d done, but we\u2019d never actually done something where it was me singing to a string quartet. I mean, I grew up with The Beatles and stuff like that, so I liked \u201cEleanor Rigby,\u201d and some of the George Martin orchestrations for \u201cI Am The Walrus\u201d are pretty incredible. Also, Tony Visconti did some orchestrations for some Marc Bolan songs \u2014 on the documentary Born to Boogie, they did three songs, and I think one of them was \u201cChildren of the Revolution,\u201d where it was Marc singing his songs to a string quartet \u2014\u00a0and I loved that. And that\u2019s what kind of made me think, \u2018What about if we try something I\u2019ve never tried before?\u2019 Which was me just singing with a string quartet \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s actually called doubled quartet. \u2018What about if I\u2019m singing that? \u2018Maybe that will bring out the lyrics of the song and bring out the emotional content of this montage and help you feel what I\u2019d gone through.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the lyrics of \u201cDying to Live\u201d\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is the story of my musical life, really \u2014\u00a0what I decided to do with my life from punk rock onwards, when I got a chance to live my dream of doing music and of having an artistic life. So now you\u2019re getting to feel the emotions of someone who got to live their dream and has had an artistic life, and it\u2019s still going on. It\u2019s not ending. It\u2019s carrying on. It\u2019s growing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn \u201cDying to Live\u201d being shortlisted for the best original song Oscar\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s just incredible. I mean, you can\u2019t imagine things like that, especially if I go back and think about the young me, even prior to punk \u2014\u00a0could I ever imagined what was going to happen, that one day you\u2019d even be on a shortlist with all these other great people doing fantastic work? I mean, it\u2019s pretty incredible. That in itself is an award.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Billy Idol\u2019s heyday may have been the 1980s, but he has never gone away. The English punk-turned-rock singer\/songwriter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[4648,102592,142550,434,18,117,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-283505","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-awards","9":"tag-billy-idol","10":"tag-billy-idol-should-be-dead","11":"tag-celebrities","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115892339769771493","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}