“I still don’t know”: Why Billy Joel never fully figured out ‘River of Dreams’
It’s not an artist’s job to tell the audience what their songs are about. Sometimes tunes can be too personal for someone to get into whenever an interviewer starts grilling them about their career, but Billy Joel always seemed to have tunes that acted as slices of life rather than some grand expose on his personal life. Still, that didn’t mean that he had all the answers when someone asked him about how his songs were supposed to be formatted.
Then again, Joel’s music was never going to fit into a neat box, to begin with. He still knew how to write a fantastic pop song, but listening to what he was doing on many of his hits, it was far more sophisticated than what the standard writers were doing, especially when he threw in some jazz and classical parts here and there to keep everyone on their toes.
But somewhere around the 1980s, Joel found a certain rhythm that seemed to work. He could still make more challenging music like The Nylon Curtain, but there were so many more opportunities for him to write hits like ‘Uptown Girl’ or ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire.’ And no matter how cheesy some of his songs seemed, there’s a certain musical sixth sense someone has to have to get an a cappella song like ‘For The Longest Time’ on the radio.
Once he started to slow things down, ‘The Piano Man’ seemed less concerned with having massive hits. There was still room for him to grow, but looking at River of Dreams, it’s no surprise why the title track was the only track to make it a hit. There were still fantastic songs, but how the hell was anyone going to get ‘Blonde Over Blue’ or ‘A Minor Variation’ on the radio in an era that was dominated by alternative music?
Still, ‘River of Dreams’ is a fairly deep listen. While Joel is probably the last person anyone would expect to make a gospel ballad, hearing him sing about these towering images of a valley of tears while walking in his sleep is borderline psychedelic. But even if he wrote it doesn’t mean he’s fully pieced everything together.
Since the whole thing came to him in his sleep, Joel figured that everything was pulled out of his subconscious, saying, “It’s got all these biblical references. I still don’t know what it means, but it was still strong visual images. [Lines like] ‘Through the valley of fear, the desert of truth’. I’m not a biblical person or a religious guy, but these images were very strong, and that was the reason I wrote it. I haven’t figured it out, but it became a hit record.”
Then again, that biblical imagery managed to fit right in alongside the other acts coming out circa 1993. After all, REM had already made ‘Losing My Religion,’ and even pop-up acts like Dishwalla were asking someone to tell them all their thoughts on God on ‘Counting Blue Cars,’ so there was still room for something a bit more cerebral than the typical self-destructive tendencies of Nirvana and Pearl Jam.
But that was only a small sample of what Joel had to offer on the album. Whether his fans knew it or not, this was him closing the book on his career, and if he was going to go out swinging, he may as well have had something heavy to talk about rather than write another version of ‘Just The Way You Are’.
