BILLY: STAY TUNED
Releasing new song
Step aside, “Uptown Girl.” There’s a new Billy Joel pop song in town.
For the first time in 30 years, the 74-year-old Piano Man will release a new pop song, titled “Turn the Lights Back On,” on Feb. 1.
Joel (above) teased the new tune at the Dec. 19 show of his 10-year Madison Square Garden residency, telling the crowd, “I have good news. I have bad news. I’ll give you the bad news first. We don’t have anything new to play for you. The good news is you don’t have to sit through something you have no idea what it is,” Billboard reports. “Although we’ve got a little something we’ve been working on you might hear sometime.”
The song, written by Joel, Freddy Wexler, Arthur Bacon and Wayne Hector, includes the lyr“Did ics, I wait too long . . . to turn the lights back on.” This will be Joel’s first single with words since 2007’s “All My Life.” He retired from songwriting in 1993 after the release of “River of Dreams.” “I couldn’t be as good as I wanted to be,” Joel told Vulture in 2018. “I was always trying to feel like there was a real progression in my work, and eventually I realized I was only going to be X good.
“Because of that, I knew I was going to beat myself up for not being better,” he said. “So I stopped. That’s it.”
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee has sold more than 150 million records worldwide and has bounced around genres, including rock, pop and even a 2001 album of classical music compositions titled “Fantasies & Delusions.”
In 2007, Joel told Billboard that he wasn’t “ruling out the possibility of writing songs again.”
Residency ending
“I suppose if I had the motivation to write a song, I’m not gonna stop myself from doing it. I just haven’t felt the compulsion to write songs in pop form,” he said at the time. “I guess these days I just think of myself as a composer.”
It is unclear if “Turn the Lights Back On” is a one-off pop gift for fans or the first introduction to an extensive project.
The Post has contacted reps for Joel for comment.
Joel is slated to conclude his Madison Square Garden residency July 25. He also is scheduled to perform with other class acts, including Sting and Stevie Nicks, this year.