Dismayed by the second Bush administration's war on Iraq, Billy wrote this protest song. He gave it to an up-and-coming singer-songwriter from Long Island, Cass Dillon, saying that it made more sense coming from someone who was around the age of the soldiers who were fighting. (A live version with Billy on vocals was released as a single in Australia).
The guitar-based, Beatles-ish tune sounds musically like it could have fit on Billy's last album, River of Dreams. Lyrics-wise, it is very much a successor to "Goodnight Saigon" from 1982's The Nylon Curtain. But whereas that song avoided passing judgment on the war itself, "Christmas in Fallujah " doesn't. Part of the song focuses on the soldiers, who feel forgotten, afraid, and alone. But the sharpest lines take aim at the profit-minded thinking that put them there in the first place: "They say Osama's in the mountains / Deep in a cave near Pakistan / But there's a sea of blood in Baghdad / A sea of oil in the sand."
All of the proceeds from the song went to a nonprofit, Homes For Our Troops.
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Billy's other new song of 2007 was created as a gift for his third wife Kristie Lee on the occasion of their second anniversary.
It was an odd gift, because it's not a traditional love song. The lyrics are more about him than her, and read largely as a mea culpa ("I've hurt the ones who cared"; "I've been a wild, restless man"). At the end, they shift awkwardly to the idea that she helped him change his ways, which again, is more about him than her. So it's probably no surprise that Billy and Kristie divorced a couple years later.
Recorded with his old producer Phil Ramone, the song is very much in the pop-jazz style of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, even down to the orchestra backing. Though "All My Life" is not an awful song, it was frankly disappointing for Billy's big return to be something as musically unoriginal and nondescript as this.
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After River of Dreams (1993), Billy lost interest in the write-record-tour treadmill. It was a decision with lots of factors behind it.
Partly, he lost his drive to go through the process of recording an album. "You have to have a certain amount of ambition to want to do all that," he said in a 2014 New Yorker interview. "And I look back at the guy who was the recording artist, this Billy Joel guy, and I think, Who the fuck was that guy? He was very ambitious, very driven, and I don’t feel like that anymore.”
For another, he didn't want to descend into mediocrity, saying he'd seen artists continue to put out "worse and worse" albums as their career goes on.
Perhaps most tellingly, he had become wary of opening himself up. After his very public divorce from Christie Brinkley in 1994, he didn't like the way fans and critics went sorting through the lyrics of River of Dreams to look for clues to the relationship's demise. "I felt like there was a proctoscope up my butt," he said in the same New Yorker interview. "Everybody interrogating, analyzing -- everything I wrote was fraught with meanings -- and I said, 'Wait a minute, I don’t want to rip myself open and let everyone see everything.' It was no longer comfortable. 'Enough! I gave you enough!'"
He wisely realized that a Billy Joel who didn't open himself up in his songs wasn't one that anybody would particularly want to hear. But that didn't mean he stopped the music from pouring out of him. He continued to compose, which is what ultimately led to Fantasies and Delusions, a collection of 10 opuses for solo piano. This really is classical-style music, meaning that there are no pop songs lurking inside, a fact that disappointed me greatly when I first heard the record.
I'm no great judge of classical composing, so all I can say is that it's fine for what it is, and pleasant enough to listen to. But there's nothing to mark it as being the work of Billy Joel, a fact compounded by the fact that he didn't perform the pieces himself, instead handing that task over to Richard Hyung-Ki Joo. This is not a criticism of Joo, but had Billy recorded the pieces himself, maybe we would have heard that tone, personality, passion that we connect to in his pop songs.
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