The 1993 Billy Joel song that the world destroyed: “It took me down”
The history of rock and roll isn’t usually written by people like Billy Joel.
Many of us expect our rockstars to be one of the biggest personalities in the world and live every day like they are still 25, but Joel was the first of his kind who managed to go down in history based on his knack for writing perfect song after perfect song. But like all great songwriters, Joel also knew when his time was up when he thought that he had run out of gas halfway through the 1990s.
That’s not to say that River of Dreams is a terrible album by any means. Joel was simply coming to the end of the line in a sense, and while he could still write a decent pop song, that’s not where his heart was anymore. He wanted the chance to make music without caring about where it would land on the charts, and a lot of the record is about him saying goodbye to his days riding that musical merry-go-round.
He wasn’t bowing out by any means, but there were many pieces of the album that seemed like they would be his final message to the world. ‘Lullaby’ is a beautiful song to his daughter, and the title track is one of the most soulful tunes that he has ever created, but it’s not like everyone was looking at the end of a song like ‘Famous Last Words’ and thinking that he was going to be making an album within a year’s time.
Joel was firmly shutting the book on that part of his career, but it wasn’t all that bad, either. He could see that the world was looking up for him, and while his marriage to Christie Brinkley didn’t last around that time, he felt like he had the best kind of life he could ask for. The world seemed to be prospering, and ‘Two Thousand Years’ seemed like a decent way of seeing hope in the world, but the entire world was going to be shattered in only a few years after he released his final record.
‘Two Thousand Years’ was supposed to be the kind of hopeful look to the future, but right after 9/11, Joel seemed to dial back some of that optimism. He still wanted to play for anyone and everyone following the tragedy, but he knew that he would be a fool to sing a song about how the world was looking up and how the country had the wind at their sails every single time they woke up in the morning.
The entire world seemed to stop on September 11th, and Joel felt that the song wasn’t nearly as relevant as it used to be, saying, “I was very hopeful when I wrote that song. Hopeful to the point of being extremely naive. I had all these great predictions about how science and poetry would rule in the new era, and I was just very optimistic about the future, and then, boom, what happened? 9/11 – which was just such an inhumane, horrendous act.”
Concluding, “It really took me down, and this is just how optimistic I was before all that happened, then recognised things really aren’t going to change all that much. It was a wake-up.”
And while Joel was ready to write songs responding to the ongoing war, like ‘Christmas in Fallujah’, he knew that there were far better songwriters who were ready to give up hope all over again. A lot of people were angry around that time, but as long as there were artists like Bruce Springsteen leading the charge with records like The Rising, the country could withstand virtually anything.
So while Joel didn’t see the point in performing the song anymore, ‘Two Thousand Years’ does serve as a nice time capsule of his state of mind at that time. The world hadn’t yet taken such a dark turn, but for the next few years, it looked like Joel had absolutely nothing to worry about once he closed the book on his recording days.
