Another war, another hit, and the 2007 song Billy Joel was too old to sing
By the turn of the 21st century, Billy Joel was all but ready to give up on the thankless task of releasing new music.
He had one final hurrah in the form of the classical compositions album Fantasies and Delusions, and thereafter solely committed himself to the touring lifestyle, a noble cause that many artists would absolutely run a mile from. Singing to thousands night after night was electric, of course, but some things still stopped Joel in his tracks.
One of those events came out of an air of undeniable tragedy and futility – the fact that legions of young men, not so dissimilar in their hopes, dreams, and ambitions as Joel would have been at one time, were returning home from fighting in wars forever changed, both in a mental and physical capacity. It’s easy to feel helpless when faced with that, but the ‘Piano Man’ decided to write a song.
This was something that Joel was actually no stranger to. He’s done the same thing before with regards to the Vietnam War on 1982’s ‘Goodnight Saigon’, but in the quarter of a century that had passed between then and 2007, society had changed in many ways. One thing that had remained shockingly consistent was the conflicts being waged.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iran spurred the songwriter into action once again in the 2000s, so he wrote the track ‘Christmas in Fallujah’. As he then said in his own words, “I just thought it was strange that we were involved in another war again. There were young people being sent off to a foreign land, to risk their lives, and some of them weren’t going to come back.”
Conflict itself may have kept its ugly mark in the world, but the other main thing that had altered over the years was Joel himself. He was not the same man as he was in previous decades, both in terms of age and musicality, and knew, by the fact that he was 58 years old at the time, that he would not be the right fit for singing a new song about being sent off to fight.
That was why he enlisted the help of a then-unknown singer by the name of Cass Dillon, whom his guitarist had been working with, to perform the vocals on the track, because he wanted it to be “somebody young, about a soldier’s age”. The youth, the fear, the naivety in his voice was something Joel was determined to capture, and hinged majorly on the song’s success.
‘Christmas in Fallujah’ was released in December 2007 as part of Joel’s online EP, A Good Thing Never Dies. Profits were donated to charities helping injured soldiers returning from conflict. It clearly helped with some level of gratification. But at the same time, you could tell as Joel spoke about it that he knew it was never enough.
At the end of the day, what’s a musician to do in response to the horrors of conflict erupting around the world? In Joel’s case, feeling compelled to head back to the studio is one thing, but passing on that voice to the younger generation was a powerful testament to not just star command but the real cause that lay underneath it.
