“What’s the point”: The album that made Billy Joel quit music
No artist should ever be forced out of making any more new music. They are the ones making the songs, and they should be the ones to put their foot down on whether or not they are going to release any new material or fade into the background. Even the classic artists tend to fade away over time, though, and Billy Joel was convinced that he had started to say too much when he got to the end of his recording career.
When listening to every Joel album together, though, it does make up a decent body of work. While he did have a bit of a strange period before hitting major hits like ‘Piano Man’, he could always be counted on to make something that was a bit more musically sophisticated than his peers. It was easy for many people to figure out the chords to some pop songs, but ‘Just The Way You Are’ had the kind of chord progression that felt ripped out of a black-and-white arthouse movie.
Though Joel’s music was never exactly considered cool in its day, that didn’t stop him from selling in droves. Even for some critics who couldn’t stand anything that tasteful, Joel was the dirty little secret that everyone would never cop to listening to, even though they would be secretly jamming out to songs like ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me’ in the comfort of their own home with no one else around.
And for a brief period, that resulted in him actually becoming a pop star. He may have been the last person most would think had the same kind of charisma as Michael Jackson or Madonna, but his videos on MTV made him a darling of the channel for a while, even if tunes like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ leaned more into the goofy side of his sound than anything genuine.
That may have paid off in the 1980s, but his brand of music was already on its way out by the time the 1990s kicked in. Joel could be a bit corny for some fans to take in even at the best of times, but if it was tolerated on the charts back then, there was no way he would be given the same treatment when Nirvana was the biggest band in the world. Which is a shame because River of Dreams is among Joel’s finest albums, whether that’s the beautiful ‘Lullaby’ or the gospel groove of the title track.
If fans and labels couldn’t appreciate it at the time, though, Joel figured it was time for him to step away, saying, “I put a lot of work into River of Dreams, and it was as if the business had left me behind because there are substantial songs on that album that never went anywhere. So I said, ‘What’s the point of putting myself through writing and recording if it doesn’t mean what it’s supposed to mean out there in the world?’”
Although that statement does seem a little bit pretentious coming from the same guy who wrote ‘For The Longest Time’, he does have a small point. River of Dreams was one of his finest moments as a writer, and since many of his previous albums had been torn through the mud, he probably figured it was about time he made music only for himself rather than watch the charts to see if people had picked up on what he was trying to say.
But, really, Joel’s decision to walk away may have been about being realistic. He may have eventually entered the mainstream again with songs like ‘Turn the Lights Back On’, but it was better for him to make music that made him happy and coax by on his hits as he entered the second half of his career.
