Billy Joel<\/a> released his last rock album, 1993\u2019s critically acclaimed River of Dreams. The prolific songwriter has put down his pen since then and in a recent interview, shared that it was because he didn\u2019t want to \u201cdilute\u201d his legacy.<\/p>\n\n\tWhen speaking to fellow musician Rick Beato, Joel said that after releasing River of Dreams, he \u201cfelt like I was done.\u201d \u201cI was married [to\u00a0Christie Brinkley], I had a child. I didn\u2019t want to lock myself in a cave and devote myself like a monk to writing anymore,\u201d he continued. He added that after making 12 albums, he thought: \u201c\u2018You know what?\u00a0The Beatles\u00a0had 12 albums.\u2019 And that was just enough for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tJoel said that some artists who continued to put out records \u201cdilute their legacy.\u201d \u201cMaybe they\u2019re not as good as they used to be or they\u2019re not as motivated as they were, but it ends up trailing off,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to go like that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile Joel may be on a songwriting hiatus, the musician did release a classical album, Fantasies & Delusions\u00a0in 2001. \u201cI was ready to do that and it was something I had to get out of my system,\u201d he said of his 12th studio album. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to just keep beating a dead horse and being played because I was Billy Joel. I wanted it to be good, and I recognized that I didn\u2019t have the same motivation that I used to have so I said, \u2018Stop. Don\u2019t kill it.’\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n
\n\tJoel hasn\u2019t completely resisted songwriting, either. He released his first original song in 17 years, \u201cTurn the Lights Back On<\/a>,\u201d in 2024. Produced by Freddy Wexler, the tender ballad was written by Joel, Wexler, British songwriter Wayne Hector, and Arthur Bacon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The artist released his last rock album in 1993 It\u2019s been over three decades since Billy Joel released…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":936074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[22765,185,171,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-936073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-billy-joel","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116922758700309207","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/936074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}