If Eddie Van Halen made me a rock guitarist in high school, Billy Joel brought me back to make room for piano and voice late in my college years. See, my college was on Long Island, a place as closely identified with Billy as my home state of New Jersey is with Bruce. During my college years, going out to a place with a jukebox meant more likely hearing Billy's deep cuts than his mega-hits. Billy's live album “Songs in the Attic” made me want to sit down at a piano and sing. So I learned “Miami: 2017,” “I've Loved These Days” and “She's Got a Way.”
Fun fact: My college, Stony Brook University, had a terrible flood in its performing arts center shortly after I graduated. The headline in our school paper was “Steinway Stew,” describing the ruined grand pianos. Guess who donated replacement pianos to his local school in need? I'll give you a hint. His first name's Billy and his last name's Joel.
So, I was more than interested when Billy took to the piano on Grammy night to debut his first newly recorded song in over 30 years, “Turn the Lights Back On.” With this performance he created a full-circle moment involving the last song we had previously heard from him: “Famous Last Words,” the closing track to his 1993 album “River of Dreams.”
In that previous midtempo melodic rocker, Billy asserted that he's done making records and he doesn't know when, if ever, he'll return to the process. And for three decades, he lived by that declaration. In that time, he composed classically influenced pieces for concert pianists to record. He also wrote a song to commemorate American sacrifice in Iraq, to be sung by another artist.
A record producer, Freddy Wexler, befriended Billy not long ago and gradually convinced him to try making just one more Billy Joel record to see how it felt, to give his fans something. The result struck me very much as a conversation with “Famous Last Words” across the decades. Billy's new song “Turn the Lights Back On” expressed a sense of wanting to return, to help bring the magic back if possible, if it's not too late. Back in ‘93 it was a goodbye song. Now it’s a hello again song that goes with it.
I geek out over moments like that! Here's why…
My own Full-Circle Moments in Songs
I too have had full-circle moments with my songs and records. Both were conversations across the decades with selections from my 2003 debut album “American Road.”
On that first record I had a song called “My Gentle Warrior,” an ode to my wife Amy, observing the patience, vigilance and persistence it took for her to manage a very brittle case of type 1 (childhood onset) diabetes. Nearly two decades later I've come to learn a better way than to be at war with parts of yourself, even with illness. Self-compassion can yield much better benefits than a mentality of fighting - it's like the ultimate humanitarian mission to yourself. So I wrote “Battle” in 2020 with the message “I thought this was a battle…” The resulting song appears on my 2022 album “Salt and Sand: Rock Songs to Heal the Mind.”
My other full-circle moment came courtesy of my mom. My debut album contained a track “It's About Time,” which remains a staple of my live shows. This song calls for examination of repeated patters of conflict with loved ones (but also more globally, like with other countries) and the courage to change. Two decades later Mom expressed interest in creating a song that could speak to having heeded the words of “It's About Time” and having made some of those hard changes. So she presented me with a poem containing what I considered to be verses in a potential new song. I gave it the chorus and the title “When the Time Came.”
Talk to me about your own full-circle moments in life or in art using the comments below.