74-year-old self-described piano man Billy Joel has legion fans and more than a few detractors too.myrna suarez/Supplied
“Maybe you love me, maybe you don’t,” Billy Joel sings on Turn The Lights Back On. “Maybe you’ll learn to, and maybe you won’t.” The 74-year-old self-described piano man has legion fans and more than a few detractors too. He’s not ready to give up on anyone.
Turn The Lights Back On, released Thursday, is an earnest, waltzing song about a long relationship gone flat. Wondering whether the spark can be regained, Joel takes the blame: “Though I used to be romantic, I’ve forgot somehow.”
He’s not a bad man; he’s just out of practice.
Columbia Records is selling Turn The Lights Back On as Joel’s “first new single in decades.” Apparently 2007′s All My Life doesn’t count, as that pop tune for the crooner crowd was technically a promotional single. The point is that Joel has been out of the recording game for quite a while, though he still gives concerts.
Over his career, Joel has written graceful love songs and cornball ones too: She’s Got a Way, Just the Way You Are, She’s Always a Woman, Honesty. I’ll let you decide which are shmaltz and which are winners. Turn The Lights Back On is more the latter than the former.
It was produced by and co-written with Freddy Wexler, a Grammy-winning song crafter whose phone calls are answered by the likes of Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Pink, Post Malone and Celine Dion. The track is lush, with brooding strings, dramatic percussion and the kind of dappled piano notes that roll off Joel’s fingers like syllables to a poet.
There’s a nagging Elton Johnness to the vocals. The line “is there still time for forgiveness” at the 2:50 mark sounds so much like him that it might as well come with a duck suit or a bad toupee.
John and Joel are among pop music’s greatest hitmakers. John has stayed somewhat relevant. Joel, not so much. “I’m trying to find the magic that we lost somehow,” he sings. Pop stars and lovers know that magic is tough to sustain, and even harder to regain. It is encouraging to see that Joel’s melodic sentimentality hasn’t gone dark.
Columbia Records is selling Turn The Lights Back On as Joel’s 'first new single in decades.'Supplied
BILLY JOEL’S BEST
The Long Island singer-songwriter hasn’t had a Top 40 song in more than 30 years, but he’s still Billy Joel to us. Here is a list of five of his best tunes, from a man of many hits (and a few misses).
Big Shot: Pop music has always had diss tracks, it’s just that songwriters such as Carly Simon and Alanis Morissette were lyrically discreet when it came to outing their targets. The scathing opening track from the 1978 album 52nd Street swaggers with jazz-hands energy as it taunts a hungover high-society protagonist. The uptown girl in question? Bianca Jagger, Joel later revealed.
Vienna: With its sleepy chord progression and plaintive tone, this ballad got lost among the radio favourites of Joel’s 1977 blockbuster The Stranger. The cautionary song that advocates for a slower pace of life is reportedly a favourite of Joel’s and no doubt is admired by the Austrian National Tourist Office too.
Scenes From an Italian Restaurant: When he wrote this piano-based opus about remembered people and places, Joel would have been in his mid-twenties, the same age John Lennon and Elton John were when they wrote In My Life and Crocodile Rock, respectively. With a reference to a waterbed purchase and a dated song arrangement involving an accordion, a blaring saxophone and keening strings, has Scenes From an Italian Restaurant aged as well as the aforementioned other classics? As with wine and other things, it all depends upon your appetite.
Only the Good Die Young: Catchy, controversial and, right from the opening line, unambiguously randy: “You Catholic girls start much too late / But sooner or later it comes down to fate / I might as well be the one.” The 1977 hand-clapper about young male lust and a girl unsubtly named Virginia is pure Springsteen-lite fun.
Piano Man: Though some criticized the mocking tone of Joel’s piano bar observations, the song’s supposed real-life inspirations – including Paul the real estate novelist and Davy who’s still in the Navy – never filed any defamation suits as far as we know. This is elite storytelling of the Harry Chapin kind; even “la, la-la, di-dee-da” sets a scene. Brad Wheeler