Billy Joel “Turn the Lights Back On”
Sincerely, I thought it was over — that he was gone, or minimally, well contained. I mean, obviously, I knew he was still alive. At some point I was informed that he was sober, quadrice married and a new, old dad again. I presumed — rightfully I think — that his life was a constant loop between Long Island and Florida, where he could quietly fish, and Madison Square Garden, where he could thrill aging fans with loyal renditions of his greatest hits. But it had been thirty years since “River of Dreams.” In the interim, I entered middle age and Billy neared sunset. I assumed a lot of things about Grandpa Billy, but the one thing I knew for sure was that it was over.
“It” referred both to Billy’s career as a maker of new music and of my long simmering disdain for said music. I figured that we might hear pieces from the archives one day — something classical or hymnal or instrumental. But, never in a million years did I think he’d revisit 52nd Street or walk through the Turnstiles or throw stones at Glass Houses again. Those words sounded like the titles of horror movies to me. Typing them now gives me the chills. Similarly, I concluded that my bilious Billy epithets were behind me. Never again would I have to fake gag at his Bruce does Broadway bridge and tunnel-ness. His smartest music teacher becomes petulant Pop star-ness. His watch me do The Beatles doing Gershwin in iambic pentameter-ness. It had been decades. He’d given up the fight. I’d given up the fight. We’d called it a draw.
As for why I gave up, the answer was simple — my resistance was stupid. And futile. I had always recognized Billy’s talent. In fact, I had always admired his craft. My antagonism was a byproduct of identity politics. One could not love The Replacements and Billy Joel in 1987 — of that I was certain. But more so, my hostility was a symptom of my own insecurity. I viewed Billy as a gifted copycat. A mimic. Worse — a poseur. And my teenage self, who one hundred and ten percent felt like a fraud, did not want to be reminded of it by a millionaire, Pop star who was married to a supermodel. The thing that I observed in Billy Joel was the thing I most hated in myself. And that could not stand.
Which is why I declared war right around the time of “Storm Front” and why I declared truce twenty years later, around the birth of my third child — when I had finally, fully grown up. The cold war having cooled, the nylon curtain having been pulled down, I settled into a comfortable indifference towards the Billy Joel songbook. And that comfortable indifference blossomed into a mild warmth. Which, eventually, became a sincere fondness. Which is why, in 2022, when Olivia Rodrigo — who my tween daughter completely adores and who I in turn also adore — joined Billy up on stage at Madison Square Garden, I felt something approximating affection — a genuinely paternalistic bond. And, most of all, I felt zero disdain.
But then, eighteen months later, when it was announced that Billy Joel was releasing a new song — his first in nearly two decades — I felt a twinge of pain. A tweak of some old injury that, if I didn’t honor it, could lead to something catastrophic. I wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening. I liked the way things were going — no new music from Billy and no more eye rolling from me. But I also knew that this was something I could not ignore. It had the sound of a big deal — a very big deal. And so, on February 1st, along with five million or so other Spotify listeners, I pressed play on “Turn the Lights Back On,” the new single from William Martin Joel.
“Turn the Lights Back On” is a very good Billy Joel song, to the extent that it is a Billy Joel song at all. It borrows more than a little from the piano outro to “Layla,” at least a dozen McCartney tricks and probably a bunch of classical compositions I could not identify. It’s in the vicinity of “Always a Woman” and “And So it Goes” while still being very aware of Adele and (yes) Olivia. It’s plaintive and simple for the first eighty seconds and then, when the drums and strings kick it, it soars from absolutely pretty to defiantly spine tingling. This is a song that knows exactly what it is and what it wants to accomplish. By almost any measure, it’s a wonderful song. In fact, maybe a little bit too wonderful.
Upon second and third listen, I began to pull on that thread. I didn’t recall Billy’s range being so high. Was his voice electronically raised an octave? Was autotune involved? Some of the lifts and runs started to sound unnatural to my ears. Not unpleasant, but almost certainly enhanced. Like tasteful, minor cosmetic work — just slightly noticeable but also expert enough to elicit compliments. “Oh Billy — are you doing something different? Whatever it is, it sounds great!”
And then, in four minutes — or exactly three if you are listening to the radio edit — the song was over. The twinge passed. I exhaled and thought about how the song was typical Billy — full of romance and self doubt. But also, and much more so, how the romance and self doubt were not about a woman but rather about Billy’s relationship to his fans. Would they still love him — old and gray and leaky-eyed? His youthful vanity had been subsumed by an existential narcissism. Billy wants to know if he still matters now. Not the older songs. Not Piano Man Billy. This guy and this song.
I admit to being earnestly touched by the sentiment — and maybe a little pleased with myself for receiving it so openly. Turns out that I didn’t mind the cosmetic surgery or whatever is allowing Billy to sound like Billy the Kid. In fact, I kind of liked it. “Yes, Billy, you may turn the lights back on,” I thought to myself. For a moment, I’d communed with Billy, which in a weird way connected me back to my daughter who had asked about him by way of Olivia, and everything was fine and dandy. Until I looked at the song credits. Which was just an afterthought but in retrospect maybe a mistake. Because when I read them I couldn’t help but notice that there were four — yes four — men credited with writing “Turn the Lights Back On.” And that really threw me.
Four. Four co-writers. To my knowledge, in his entire career, and notwithstanding Atilla, Billy had only co-written songs three times. Once with Cyndi Lauper (meh). Once with actor Paul Reiser, who wrote the lyrics for a song that I think appeared in “Mad About You” but was sung by BeBe Winans (can’t explain). And once for a melody he swiped from Beethoven (tracks). Otherwise, Billy wrote solo. So the idea that a man who’d only credited three other writers in two decades wrote this one song with three other men — Freddy Wexler, Arthur Bacon and Wayne Hector — that was a tell.
Now, many Billy Joel songs have “tells.” The “but still your fingers gonna pick your nose” in “Captain Jack.” The “Belgians in the Congo” in “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The “right at this moment I’m totally cool” from “I Go to Extremes.” In so many of his songs, Billy does something gratuitous and weird that screams “look at me” while it begs “please don’t look here.” My buddy Steve calls these “Durstian burps” — a reference to Robert Durst’s incessant, implicating gurgling in “The Jinx.” I barely noticed the Durstian burps on “Turn the Lights Back On.” The words ring so true. The melody so familiar. There’s not a hair out of place. Even the autotune (or whatever it is) is executed tastefully. But three other writers? That demanded investigation.
Turns out that Freddy Wexler, one of those co-writers, met Billy because they have the same doctor or they know the same doctor or something about a doctor. Wexler is a fan, who is also a songwriter whose written for Ariana Grande, The Jonas Brothers, Kanye, Selena Gomez and many others. He’s apparently the real deal except that he looks a lot like Adrian Grenier which makes me wonder if he’s really the real deal. Meanwhile, co-writer Wayne Hector is an English songwriter who seems to dabble in Pop and who got his start as a member of a Nineties new jack swing outfit called Rhythm N Bass. This makes me somewhat more suspicious. And then, finally, there’s co-writer Arthur Bacon, who may be a real person and who probably is a actual living person but who could also be a pseudonym for Paul McCartney.
Apparently Billy had been stashing away ideas — parts of melodies, little hooks, half bridges, hummed choruses — ever since “River of Dreams” but could not, would not complete a song. Rather than push his hero for the unthinkable, though, Wexler simply asked whether he could hear some of those scraps. And eventually, through a combination of talent, elbow grease, Wayne Hector and Arthur Bacon, “Turn the Lights Back On” was born. The story is vague enough to be true. But it is also vague enough to make me ask, “Did Billy write the song at all?” In fact, given the sheen of the song, I couldn’t not wonder whether any human had written the song. The more I considered it, the more plausible it seemed that a very smart AI might have produced “Turn the Lights Back On.” Maybe Billy Joel’s new single was an AI deep fake. Maybe its perfection was actually an uncanny valley.
Or maybe I needed to give Billy a break. Which I did. For exactly three days — until February 4th, when my Olivia and Taylor-loving daughter and I resolved to watch Billy perform at sixty-sixth annual The Grammy Awards. My daughter’s motives were, of course, more innocent than mine. I needed to see and hear Billy sing to know if these tells were telling me something. I needed to determine whether old Billy, like young and middle-aged Billy, was posing. Suddenly feeling less generous than I’d felt just three days earlier, I watched the entire broadcast. I waited through all the teases. Through Trevor Noah hamming it up next to much less hammy Billy. Through all the Billie, Olivia and Taylor fun. I watched every minute of it, including the commercials, waiting for Billy to get up on stage and prove me right. Or wrong. It didn’t really matter. I just needed to know the truth.
When the moment finally arrived, the stage was dimmed to brink of midnight, just slightly backlit, spotlight on Billy’s baby grand piano, his bald dome, white goatee, black sunglasses, black leather jacket, black shirt and (yes) black tie. He looked very much like a man who wanted to disappear. But, of course, he could not. Soon, more lights flashed on. Billy emerged. Round and hunched over. The band behind him, especially the strings, came into view. It was definitely Billy Joel up there. Definitely playing the piano. And absolutely singing the song — seemingly half an octave (at least) lower than the voice on the record. But it was him. And he sounded good. And the song sounded great. And I stop wondering about deep fake Billy or whether he actually wrote the song because I realize something more important — Billy Joel is really trying up there. He’s faking nothing. He looks a little scared. He wants to do good. He wants to deliver. He’s seventy-four but he might as well be fourteen. He just wants us to like him.
And that was always the thing about Billy Joel. He cared too much. His standards were unreachable. His insecurity was bottomless. And while those problems are not uncommon, Billy’s talent was. That combination of inordinate talent pitted against impossible expectations are what drove Billy. Drove him to greatness. To drink. To pretend that he did not care what critics thought even though it was evident that he cared deeply. That he was preoccupied with criticism. And that no appraisal was harsher than his own self-appraisal. Critics only confirmed what Billy knew — that he would never, ever be good enough. He’d never be Bruce, much less Dylan or McCartney or Irving Berlin. He knew this. And he never forgave himself for it. And so, eventually, he did the only sensible thing — he gave up.
As much as Bjorn Borg, but maybe more like Josh Hamilton or Ryan Leaf, the story of Billy Joel is the story of burnout. The story of a prodigy who self-sabotaged because he could never meet his own standards. Who was destined to betray his own talent. Who tirelessly beat himself up for it. And who needed to drink to stop the feelings. And who, when the drinking made things worse, had to stop making music so he could stop the feelings so he could stop drinking and then start feeling again.
There’s no cure for burnout, but there is one trick that does occasionally work. It’s hard to pull off. Harder still for talented and competent people to accept. And almost impossible for talented, capable people with great expectations. It seems likely that Billy Joel spent most of his life incapable of turning this trick. But, eventually, he figured it out. It’s called “asking for help.” “Turn the Lights Back On” is Billy Joel asking for help. Figuratively — he’s asking us to respond in kind and kindly. But literally, he asked others to help him write the song — a song about a man whose passion was snuffed out and who wants to feel just a flicker of that flame again. It’s probably the most honest song he’s ever written — and I’m not even sure that he actually wrote it. There’s no Anthony at the grocery store, no Brenda or Eddie or Sergeant O’Leary. It’s just an old guy willing to be seen in the light.