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In 1982, when Billy Joel was freshly divorced from his first wife, he briefly dated the supermodel Elle MacPherson. The relationship wasn’t destined to last. Joel was 33, and MacPherson was 19. Joel also had another supermodel vying for his affection: Christie Brinkley, who soon became his second wife. In 2014, Joel told biographer Fred Schruers that MacPherson was already in his apartment on the first night that he brought Brinkley back home: “Even as part of me thought, ‘Oh, God, no,’ another part of me was going, ‘Holy crap, if my friends could see me now.’”
Billy Joel and Elle MacPherson weren’t together for long, but she did inspire a couple of Joel’s songs. One of those songs was “Uptown Girl,” which became one of Joel’s biggest hits. (In the “Uptown Girl” video, Christie Brinkley played the title role.) The other was “And So It Goes,” which Joel wrote in 1983 but didn’t release until his 1989 album Storm Front. “And So It Goes” wasn’t a big hit, but Joel now says that it’s his best song.
Joel is back in the public eye these days, as he recently released “Turn The Lights Back On,” his first new music in 17 years, and gave a couple of performances at the Grammys. On the Grammys red carpet, Joel was standing alongside fourth wife Alexis Roderick when E! News asked him to name his definitive song. Without hesitation, he picked “And So It Goes.”
On Wednesday, Billy Joel appeared on The Howard Stern Show, and he went into more detail about writing that song: “It was very emotional writing the song. My heart was broken… Event the chords have a dissonant note in them, and a lot of suspensions. A suspension is a hanging note that you want to resolve.” (Stern had a piano in the studio, and Joel demonstrated by playing those notes.) Stern asked if the song was about a woman who broke up with him, and Joel said, “Didn’t really break up with me. It wasn’t going to work out, and it didn’t work out… We were mismatched. This is about a woman who went on to be a model in Europe, and she became very successful. When she came back from Europe, it just wasn’t going to happen. She never rejected me. We just made it known that nah, this is not happening.”
While on Stern, Billy Joel also talked about things like recording “We Are The World,” sneaking into a Hendrix show in Queens as a young man, and the supergroup that he once wanted to start with Don Henley and Sting. Stephen Colbert also interviewed Joel on the Late Show last night, and they discussed matters like Joel’s feelings about the Grammys and how his “Piano Man” lyrics are really a series of limericks. You can watch that interview below.
I can’t believe there’s more Billy Joel news this morning, but there is. Now, Joel has released his music video for “Turn The Lights Back On.” Directors Warren Fu and Freddy Wexler used AI deepfake technology to make it look like Joel was singing the song at different parts of his life. (Everyone’s making deepfake videos now. IDLES just dropped one a couple of days ago.) Here’s the clip.
“Turn The Lights Back On” is out now on Columbia.