What does “Turn The Lights Back On” by Billy Joel lyrics mean?
Billy Joel’s “Turn The Lights Back On” was written as a love ballad but also serves as a song about how he hasn’t released any songs in the past couple of years. The “Piano Man” singer revealed that he was inspired to make music again after his co-writer Freddy Wexler egged him on and in turn, “turn(ed) the lights back on.” “Other people have tried to talk me into going back in and doing new material, and making the recordings, and I’ve always resisted it. I studiously avoided it because songwriting had become painful,” he recalled. “I have this high bar. I said to myself, ‘If I don’t reach that bar, I beat myself up and I punched myself and I hate myself.’ So, I stopped doing it because I got tired of feeling like that,” Joel revealed on the Audacy Check-In podcast.
“The melody, the chords, the chord progression, even the time signature was something that struck me immediately, and that’s how I relate to music,” he explained “This particular lyric in this song, I’ve had these thoughts, I could have written these lyrics verbatim. I’ve chewed on these words and I’ve thought of these words, and I’ve said these words before. It was all kind of falling into place — and who am I to fight that?”
