The Day He Turned the Lights Back On

Happy New Billy Joel Music Day!

A long time ago, someone who’d apparently worked at one of the studios Billy Joel recorded in way back when, popped into my favorite Billy Joel facebook group and posted a bunch of demos and recordings that he was somehow in possession of.

One of them was a cover of “Rain” by The Beatles. And, just because it was his voice, it hit deeper for me. Just because of the little things that he added, the intonation, in what was really just a basic and faithful reconstruction of something that someone else had made.

Billy Joel doesn’t do covers very often. He had to pad out Volume 3 of his Greatest Hits, so he threw in some songs written by Bob Dylan, Carole King, and Leonard Cohen (if you’re going to sing a cover, you may as well cover the greats). On the Russian concert album, he did Back in the USSR and The Times, They Are A-Changing. In live concerts he always does a verse of some other song during the break of River of Dreams. Sometimes he’ll pull out some other song here or there.

And… shoot, okay, I have to talk about John Lennon for a second.

There’s this warbling thing that Lennon seemed to add to his songs a lot. It’s most prevalent in “Across the Universe” where it exists throughout the verses, but it also shows up in Bungalow Bill, in lines like “his elephant and gun,” and Hey Bulldog, “some kind of innocence is measured out in years.” A few other songs that don’t immediately come to mind as I’m writing this post.

It’s just this pattern that, for whatever reason, kept repeating in John Lennon’s head so much that it kept popping up in his music. And a lot of times I think about where it might have come from, why it was so ingrained into how he thought. It’s not a bad thing to have a repeating motif like that, but somehow it feels like it gives some insight into how his brain worked.

Since my new car has bluetooth, I’ve been listening to my Billy Joel playlist on random while driving, and the other day “Code of Silence” popped up. And I’ve always thought that the intro to that song was only a slight alteration to the motif of “Only the Good Die Young,” but the thought occurred to me, it’s really the only place in the entire Billy Joel canon where I can spot a repeated pattern in the vein of that John Lennon warble. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but it’s also the only song from his 12 (as of this writing?) studio albums where he collaborated with another songwriter, Cyndi Lauper.

But there are musical patterns, and there are vocal patterns, and there are instrumental patterns, and though there exists a dynamic eclecticism on the sheet music of everything he wrote, what has always underpinned his work is the stability, the consistency of his voicework and his piano playing. There is a distinct feel to how Billy Joel performs a song, no matter what song it is. Soaring ballad, hard rock, doo-wop, whatever he throws at the microphone, it is his internal subconscious pattern that effuses and connects everything he performs.

“Turn the Lights Back On” feels like a cover to me. It doesn’t feel like it has the sheet-music-dynamic sense that I get when listening to everything else he wrote. And that may well be because this song was written as a collaboration, for the second time in Billy Joel’s career, and the first time since 1986. But it’s still Billy Joel. It’s still his performance, it still has his subconscious patterns that have become *my* subconscious patterns as I listen for the thousandth time to any song he’s ever performed.

As I listen for the dozenth time to this new song that is only a few hours out in the world.

It’s his piano. It’s his voice. What more, after so many years, could I possibly ask for?