"Only the Goo Die Young" is a song from Billy Joel's 1977 pop rock album, The Stranger. The song was controversial for its time, with the lyrics describing a boy who tries to convince a Catholic girl who is a virgin to have sex with him. The girl's name, "Virginia," is a pun on "virgin." The boy/narrator believes that the girl is refusing him because she comes from a religious Catholic family and that she believes sex before marriage is sinful. To try to convince her to sleep with him, he sings, "You Catholic girls start [having sex] much too late,/ but sooner or later it comes down to fate./ I might as well be the one." Perceived as "anti-Catholic", the song was banned by many radio stations. "When I wrote 'Only the Good Die Young', the point of the song wasn't so much anti-Catholic as pro-lust", Joel told Performing Songwriter magazine. "The minute they banned it, the album started shooting up the charts."