The one Billy Joel song he admits was “extremely naive”
As a songwriter, such as Billy Joel, the job remit doesn’t extend to having a crystal ball and being able to predict the future. Instead, it’s to provide a snapshot of a specific time or place, whether this be a personal relationship or the mood of a nation.
Naturally, as the world changes, songs that may appropriately gauge the temperature of how people are feeling in one instant can age badly many years later. Unfortunately, Joel discovered this the hard way with one of his own compositions, which tells the story of an extremely different world from the one we would all shortly inhabit.
Prior to the turn of the century, there was a hope, which now feels naive, that humanity was set to be better than ever and a bright new dawn awaited on the horizon. After a gloomy decade of economic struggle during the 1980s and the dark shadow of the Cold War, things finally seemed to be turning a corner in a positive direction.
In 1993, although the new millennium was still several years away from fruition, it was already on Joel’s mind, who was besotted with the idea of a clean slate for humankind.
On his album, River of Dreams, Joel set his song ‘Two Thousand Years’ in a not-so-distant future utopia, which he believed was a genuine possibility. A positive atmosphere was in the air, which he tapped into on his track, and he thought those good times would keep on rolling forever.
For historical context, shortly before Joel penned ‘Two Thousand Years’, the USSR collapsed, leading to the conclusion of the Cold War. There was a sense of optimism about the future and a belief that humans would learn from their past mistakes, which, sadly, as we all know too well, didn’t turn out to be the case.
In the song, Joel buoyantly sings: “This is our moment, Here at the crossroads of time, We hope our children carry our dreams down the line, They are the vintage, What kind of life will they live? Is this a curse or a blessing that we give?”
At the end of the track, he concludes his rallying cry to the masses by stating: “And in the evening, After the fire and the light, One thing is certain, Nothing can hold back the night, Time is relentless, And as the past disappears, We’re on the verge of all things new, We are two thousand years.”
Over 20 years after crafting the song, Joel reflected on the creation during an interview with Sirius XM in 2016. The singer-songwriter admitted to feeling encouraged by the state of the world and looked back upon the one event that would immediately pop the air out of his balloon.
“I was very hopeful when I wrote that song,” Joel admitted. “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.”
He continued: “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.”
9/11 set a dark precedent for the years that have followed, and the rest of the first quarter of a century of the century has been of a similarly bleak nature.
Nevertheless, Joel could never have predicted the future that awaited humanity, and his intentions with ‘Two Thousand Years’ were well placed, as well as speaking on behalf of most people at that time. However, now 25 years have passed since Y2K, sadly, it does feel that world peace will likely never be fully accomplished.
