Billy Joel attended the Grammy ceremony last Sunday as brides attend an Anglo-Saxon wedding, with something new, something old and something borrowed.
The new thing,
Turn the Lights Back On
, the first song he's written in 17 years.
The old thing,
You May Be Right
, star song from their 1980 album
Glass Houses
.
And what he borrowed, the energy, the impetus and the rock attitude that was recommended to him, apparently, by one of his most illustrious new fans, the 20-year-old Californian Olivia Rodrigo, the same one who insisted on singing a duet with him a year ago and means to realize, as he said, one of his childhood dreams.
Turn the Lights Back On
is a ballad about the passage of time and life conceived as an act of resistance and sounded, appropriately, solemn and somber, with Joel on piano backed by an orchestra.
On the other hand, in his reunion with
You May Be Right
, the singer put in the rest and accelerated in the curves to deliver a fast and fast version, with unprecedented forcefulness.
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Between one topic and another, a fragment of an interview was shown in which the 74-year-old New Yorker explained why he stopped composing in the now distant 2007 and has not released a pop album with new material since 1993: “Writing songs implies for me a high degree of effort and suffering.
Surely there are those who enjoy it, but that is not my case.
So I just stopped doing it.”
Billy Joel sitting while experiencing massive success.Richard E. Aaron (Redferns)
Billy Joel relaxing on a flight between Austin and Dallas in 1978.Wally McNamee (Corbis via Getty Images)
He closed the tap from which the songs flowed, but he did not stop acting.
As musicologist Ryan Raúl Bañagale explains, the singer-songwriter from the Bronx “released an album every year and a half between 1971 and 1993” until he compiled “around 120” songs” that have made him the fourth most successful American musician in the world. history, a very short distance from Michael Jackson.
His refusal to continue enriching his songbook (he did release, in 2001,
Fantasies & Delusions
, an album of classical music in collaboration with the pianist of Korean origin Hyung-ki Joo) has turned him into a “timeless” performer, oblivious to fashions and trends, focused on a live agenda that, on occasions, has been around a hundred concerts per year.
He has filled stadiums, he has gone on massive tours with his (supposed) rival and, in reality, his old friend and accomplice, Elton John.
In a sense, in the last 30 years he has been more active than ever.
But he's no longer building an empire.
He manages a legacy.
What the public asks
Joel himself has argued his position sensibly and eloquently.
His true heritage are songs, like
Honesty, Just the Way You Are
or
Uptown Girl
, written more than 40 years ago.
People can't get enough of listening to them and he doesn't feel capable of "producing new songs that live up to" his old repertoire: "Billy Joel fans come to see me sing
Uptown Girl
."
What sense would it make to try to sell them, at this point, a product other than the one they really want to buy from you?
After all, not everyone can be expected to have the restlessness and disruptive coherence of a Bob Dylan or a David Bowie, two elusive artists, always willing to resist the expectations of their own audience.
And it is not easy to follow the example of acrobat Neil Young, who continues to pull out late gems like
Human Race
or
Don't Forget Love
from his glove compartment , but nourishes his live shows with fiftieth anniversary classics like
Heart of Gold
.
Billy Joel with his ex-partner, Christie Brinkley, in 1983.Images Press (Getty Images)
Billy Joel, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.KMazur (WireImage)
Joel has also explained that his new single is nothing more than an exception, the result of the commendable insistence of producer and composer Freddy Wexler.
A fan of the author of
Piano Man
from a young age , Wexler managed to get in touch with his idol thanks to his wife's public relations skills.
Billy received him after one of his concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York, where he has been a resident artist for the last ten years and from which he plans to say goodbye in style in July of this year, when he will reach 150 performances. .
The two men hit it off.
Wexler proposed that they write a song together and, after nearly two years of harassment and demolition, he managed to get him back into the studio to record a song in which another pair of composers, Wayne Hector and Arthur Bacon, also collaborated.
It was going to be a private recording, a simple experiment that Joel was willing to bury unceremoniously in case he was not convinced by the result: “When listening to the song, I discovered that, for the first time in a long time, the sound of my voice was not "It was hateful to me."
Wexler says his enthusiasm infected her: “Writing songs was a lot of fun for me in my youth, until it wasn't.
“Freddy helped me reconnect with that euphoria that I thought had been definitively lost.”
A late (and reluctant) resurrection
The song was released on February 1, three days before Joel performed it live for the first time, as a nostalgic finale to the Grammy gala.
Matthew Strauss described it, in
Pitchfork
, as a ballad with a “twilight” lyric (“I know I'm very late, but here I am”).
For Bañagale, it has "the hallmarks" of the most melodic Billy Joel, starting with "the rhythm and chords of
She's Always a Woman
", the exhortation to accept others without reservations or reluctance, "as in
Just the Way You Are
,” and even “a slowed down version of the piano melody from
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
.”
A song, in short, that may not contribute anything truly substantial to Billy Joel's catalog, but that does represent a more than worthy way to end what Bañagale describes as "a long period of hibernation."
Billy Joel greets the cameras on the red carpet at the recent Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Lionel Hahn (Getty Images)
Theirs has been one of the longest creative silences in the history of popular music, with the exception of the 37 years and ten months that separate Chuck Berry's penultimate album (
Rockit
) from his last (
Chuck
).
Berry's almost four-decade hiatus can be attributed to his deranged and frenetic lifestyle, with various convictions for tax evasion, brawls, sexual abuse or possession of narcotics between 1979 and 2017. His only reason for returning to the recording fold after such a long time The absence was that he had just turned 90 and considered that the time had come to say goodbye to the world, leaving a “posthumous” album, dedicated to his wife and life partner, 'Toddy' Suggs.
Joel's has been a much less eventful journey.
In August of '93 he released
River of Dreams
, his twelfth studio album.
It went quintuple platinum in the United States, the equivalent of more than five million units sold, and achieved notable success in places such as Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Germany and the United Kingdom.
But the author of it, as she told
Vulture
in 2017, felt subject to an “incomprehensible boycott” by television stations and his own label (Columbia) that made her lose her last ember of faith in the record business.
Furthermore, Billy clearly perceived that he was becoming an artist “out of time,” by persisting in producing “well-crafted, meaningful and substantial” songs, in a new industrial context in which only “image and style” mattered. marketing".
At 44 years old, he felt like “an old piece of furniture.”
He also grew tired of the paternalistic disregard with which, in his opinion, a large part of musical criticism treated him, very inclined to assign him the role of a guilty pleasure, a symbol of "bad taste" and the cultural destitution of the profane, the artist that many loved to hate.
Olivia Rodrigo and Billy Joel on stage at Madison Square Garden in 2022. Kevin Mazur (Getty Images)
Billy Joel and Elton John, friends and legends, in 2017.Jamie McCarthy (Getty Images)
So he decided to retreat to his comfort zone: the hundreds of thousands of fans who had been accompanying him since the beginning of his career, perhaps insufficient to elevate him to the level of multimillion-dollar sales of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow or Bryan. Adams, but more than suitable to ensure the viability of their tours and concerts.
River of Dreams
, by the way, concludes with a phrase that would be, to a large extent, prophetic, the one that closes the song
Famous Last Words
: “This is the last thing I had left to say.”
A (generational) bridge over troubled waters
One wonders how a septuagenarian who has been engaged in a permanent nostalgia operation for decades has managed to earn the adoration of
zetas
like Olivia Rodrigo.
In her song
De ella Deja Vu
de ella, released on her debut album,
Sour
, the Murrieta, California-born singer quoted Billy Joel.
She did it at the suggestion of the producer, David Nigro, after realizing that the song was vaguely reminiscent of Uptown Girl.
Once the album was released, Joel and Rodrigo exchanged statements.
Him, insisting on the freshness and authenticity that the music of that teenager who had just arrived in the business transmitted to him.
And she, declaring herself a “fan” of a veteran who, in her opinion, was still in top shape and as current as ever.
That mutual reverence led to their famous duet at New York's Garden in August 2022, an interlude in which they performed both
Deja Vu
and
Uptown Girl
together .
Billy Joel in what has been his second home in recent years, Madison Square Garden in New York, in 2015.Myrna Suarez (WireImage)
Last weekend they met again during rehearsals for the Grammy ceremony and chatted briefly.
“I've been asking around how long it's been since you released a new song,” says Rodrigo.
“Well, not long ago they edited a couple of my songs, but it was without my permission,” Joel responds.
“But even this last one was 17 years ago,” adds the person who recorded the meeting, apparently Freddy Wexler.
Olivia Rodrigo belongs to a generation that has discovered Billy Joel decades after he was one of the pillars of the recording industry, and has done so with an unprejudiced fervor that has surprised many
boomers
.
It is this generational change among Billy's followers that explains why one of his most popular songs right now, with more than 474 million views on Spotify, is
Vienna
, a song that was not even among the five singles on the album. which was a part,
The Stranger
.
His appearance in viral videos on TikTok has ended up turning this hidden pearl into a late-breaking classic, an artifact that went unnoticed in its day and triumphs today against all odds, in a very different world and among the most unexpected public: Joel is now himself in position 218 of the most listened to artists in the world on Spotify, above youth bestsellers.
Something similar has happened with
Zanzibar
or
Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
, powered by the Chinese network's algorithm and installed, for just a couple of years, at the top of the repertoire of a Billy Joel suitable for those under 20 years of age.
Not bad for a man who released his last album shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union and who has been surviving himself ever since with remarkable dignity and without success ever turning its back on him.
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