Grade: A
Billy Joel’s ‘Turn the Lights Back On” is perhaps not up there with the best of Billy Joel, such as “She’s Always a Woman,” but it’s up there with the better of Joel. The song is a welcome addition to his catalogue in a time when one could hardly find an artist with straight-forward rock ballads– just a regular guy singing music that appeals to the mainstream without any hip-hop or R & B inflection. That’s getting rare these days. Anyway, that’s the kind of music I like, but the music industry has decided not to produce it anymore.
Joel performed “Turn the Lights Back On” at the 2024 Grammys. According to People Magazine, it was his first original song in 17 years, but most of us haven’t heard anything new from Joel in decades. Meanwhile, he has remained active as a performer, with a record-breaking residency at Madison Square Garden, where he will complete his 150th show this summer. Joel did have cowriters on this track who helped him channel his creativity.
In the chorus of “Turn the Lights Back On,” Joel repeats the phrase, “I’m late, but I’m here right now.” On one hand, this describes the theme of the song, a lover perhaps trying to reconnect with an ex. On a meta level, it’s Billy Joel saying to his audience, “I’m late, but here I am with a new song.” It’s a reference to his absence in songwriting. Now he’s had some live concerts so he hasn’t been totally absent, but what’s important about “Turn the Lights Back On” is that it’s new music from Billy Joel, and it is worthy of his earlier body of work. When Billy Joel sings, “Did I wait too long?” the answer from his fans has to be, “No, it’s all good. Thanks for the new song.”
Ultimately the song is about a relationship in which the speaker feels that he has been not only tardy, but there has been something amiss in his comportment towards his former lover. Now, however, he knows better. He uses the metaphor of turning the lights back on as a metaphor for this self-realization about his feelings for this woman.
The song also notes the tenuous nature of love:
And maybe you love me, maybe you don't
Maybe you'll learn to and maybe you won'tThis is something more realistic than we’re used to being depicted in pop songs.
What happened to Joel during the ‘90s and 2000s? My simple explanation is that as an artist, he lost his mojo. According to an interview with Vulture in 2018, Joel was disappointed when his album River of Dreams didn’t really have the kind of success he might have hoped for. So if there was no hit song and no big exposure, it wasn’t worth it for him in terms of all the work that goes into writing and recording the music. You can’t really argue with that. The man felt like the industry had passed him by; that’s my interpretation of how he felt at the time. But meanwhile, it’s not like his fans stopped liking his music.
There was a certain magic happening for him in the 70s and 80s for him, and that music we have. The video for “Turn the Lights Back On” is an AI retrospective of his career. My favorite Billy Joel is late eighties with the black leather jacket a la “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Speaking of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” imagine a pop song that references Catcher in the Rye and Hemingway. Would the pop-tarts of our day ever make such literary allusions? You see, that’s my point.
When I was an adolescent, Joel was very popular, but it wasn’t my cup of tea, not rebellious enough I suppose. But looking back, it’s clear that he was producing some of the finest music of the 80s and early 90s. Billy Joel has always been a classy guy, even when the style of rock and roll was hedonistic and nihilistic, he seemed more like a serious musician and a decent person.
The new song is an opportunity to reflect back on Joel’s body of work. So maybe Billy Joel’s music hearkens to a more innocent and indeed optimistic time. Since Joel left, not much filled the void in the music industry, at least in terms of the type of pop-rock music that could trace it roots back to the Beatles.
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