OYSTER BAY, NY - Billy Joel
's first new pop song
in nearly two decades was sparked by someone miles from the record business: a Long Island doctor.
Joel, 74, has long said that he is not interested in recording more albums.
He released 12 studio LPs between 1971 and 1993 - most of them multi-platinum - and retired from the format, although he never stopped experimenting with classical music or performing live.
But new songs?
"I'm afraid of writing something that's not good," he said in an interview last month at his estate in Oyster Bay, New York.
"I have a very high standard. And the work to get there intimidates me. I don't want to go through that again."
Thea Traff for The New York Times
Joel's influence as a composer has endured, attracting new generations.
(“He is everything,” Olivia Rodrigo, 20, said last summer, referencing him in her song “Deja Vu”).
Over the years, the list of people who have tried to convince him to return to composing and recording has grown to become legion:
Clive Davis, Rick Rubin, Elton John.
However, when Joel's primary care doctor urged him to meet with "a guy" interested in talking about music near his home back east in Sag Harbor, he agreed to go to lunch.
The man who came to the table two years ago was
Freddy Wexler
, 37, a songwriter and producer from Los Angeles who grew up in New York and who knew a lot about Joel.
He had tried to locate his idol through industry channels without much luck, but his wife - secretly dedicated to keeping this dream alive - found an
unlikely connection
.
Joel ordered clams on the half shell and a BLT to go, Wexler recalls, so he knew he had to act quickly:
"I said, 'I don't think you can't write songs anymore or that you're not going to write songs anymore.'
And he was like, 'Okay, believe what you want.'"
Wexler pivoted and asked if Joel had any unfinished ideas from the '70s or '80s.
Joel was intrigued enough to get together again and listen to some of Wexler's music;
Convinced he was the real deal, he sent her a CD.
The young musician was perplexed for a moment:
"I didn't have a CD player, so that was an issue."
The two went back and forth working on the material, bonding in the process, and Wexler ended up revealing that he had a song he had started with some friends that he wanted Joel to hear:
"Turn the Lights Back On", a slow-building number in a 6/8 waltz with a thoughtful narrator hoping to save a fading romance.
(One of Joel's most famous songs - the one that gave him his nickname, the Piano Man - is also in that atypical
pop time
signature .)
To Wexler's relief, Joel approved of the music.
When he finally convinced his hero to participate in a recording session and get on the microphone, Wexler excitedly burst through the studio doors and asked him what he thought.
"Like singing, I guess," Joel told him.
Joel performed "Turn the Lights Back On" live for the first time on the Grammy stage on Sunday night.
Photo Mike Blake/Reuters
Direct and discreet, Joel sat at a long table in his house overlooking Oyster Bay Harbor and occasionally puffed on a fruity vape (a substitute for cigars).
Listening to that first take again, he explained, he had actually had a very significant reaction:
"I don't hate her."
"I don't know what that meant to him, because it must have been very disappointing," Joel said.
"When I say I don't hate him,
that's a big deal
."
Although almost 20,000 people have packed
Madison Square Garden
monthly (except in the middle of the pandemic) since 2014 to hear Joel croon his catalog at his Manhattan residence, "I don't consider myself a singer," he said openly.
"I'm a pianist.
"I don't like my own voice. So I usually go back and listen to a recording of my voice, and I'm always disappointed that I'm singing it," she explained.
"I always try to sound like someone else."
In a twist of fate, that confession was probably crucial in bringing "Turn the Lights Back On"
to life
.
During the couple's first meeting, Wexler posed a question about Joel's process:
"I said, 'Have you ever imagined that you are someone else when you write?
He looked at me and said, 'I've always done it.'"
When Joel was younger, he would approach the microphone imagining
Ray Charles
,
James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding
.
"If you think you're not you, you're someone else who can do this," he said.
Wexler felt identified.
He started out as an artist and dedicated himself to composing songs after the record company that had signed him withdrew.
He wrote songs for
Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and Blackpink,
but when he wanted to claim his own voice, he realized that he had no confidence in himself.
So he created a character: a guy named
Jackson Penn.
Write in pairs
Collaborative writing had never worked for Joel in the past.
He tried it with
Burt Bacharach and John Oates
, he says.
Looking back at his most fruitful recording years, he has few happy memories of the creative process.
"Writing was hell. Unless you were really fast. For example, 'New York State of Mind' came out of the blue, like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere," he explains.
"I had it in my head before I even got home."
(Allentown, on the other hand, “stood there for years,” he recalls.
"At first it was called 'Levittown,' and I didn't really have anything to write about."
After his album "River of Dreams" in 1993, Joel's only pop releases were "
All My Life
" (which he wrote for Tony Bennett) and "Christmas in Fallujah" (which Cass Dillon sang), both from 2007.
"It's been 30 years since I made a recording that I thought about publishing as my own album," he said.
Bennett, for the record, had a different reaction to Joel's insecurities when they were preparing to do a duet:
"He said, 'Well, do that Billy Joel thing.' I said, 'I don't know what that is.'
And he said, 'Well, maybe you should
talk to a psychiatrist
.'"
A lot has changed in the way music is recorded and released since "River of Dreams," which came out 10 years before the
iTunes Store
opened , but past experiences have left Joel wary.
"The music business has taken advantage of me in 50 ways since Sunday," he says.
When he talks about getting into recording, one word comes up often:
harness.
"If I put the harness back on, it's not just about singing. It's about promotion. It's about playing. It's about radio, politics, business, blah, blah, blah," he says, with a nod. hand.
"I didn't want to go back to the trappings, but if you're going to commit, you have to commit 100 percent. So I said [expletive]."
"Turn the Lights Back On," which Joel premiered live at the Grammys on Sunday night in Los Angeles and released by his longtime record label, Columbia, appealed to him with its lyrics about a relationship on the rocks. at the edge of the abyss.
"There's always that insecurity of whether I'm going to damage the relationship. Am I going to do something to ruin it? Because I've done that in the past."
(Joel is married for the fourth time and has two young daughters; his oldest daughter, Alexa Ray, is 38.)
Process
As the recording process progressed, Joel came up with ideas: percussion, strings, an acoustic guitar to give him a pulse.
The heart of the song is her crystalline voice, which is supported by her firm piano work, with some filigree touches in the bridge.
Part of the freedom he felt collaborating on the song was that "the focus was on the music, not the music business."
Some of the old concerns have faded with age and time.
"I remember getting stressed when I released a record. Will it be a success?" he says.
"What will the critics say? Are people going to like it? Now I don't have any of that. I've only sung one song. That's it. If they like it, great. If not, it doesn't mean it's not good."
Joel will end his career at the Garden in July with his 150th performance at the stadium, giving him more flexibility when booking performances in and outside of New York.
He doesn't rule out continuing to write with Wexler ("Anything is Possible") and, for the first time since the start of the residency, he has a new song to add to his playlists.
"It took someone who believed in a new Billy Joel record for Billy Joel to make a record," Joel said with a touch of amazement, "because I wasn't like that. I wasn't a Billy Joel fan. He was. And I didn't really recognize some of the things he wanted from me until I heard it."
He returned to the discreet reaction that made the whole thing possible:
"And I said, 'I don't hate it. It's not bad.'"
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