Songfacts®:

• Faith is a big theme on River Of Dreams, and this is one of six songs on the album where we hear the word "faith" in the lyrics. In this case, Joel is drawing support from his wife, Christie Brinkley, who also helped out by painting the album cover. "She gives me all the love I need to keep my faith alive," Joel sings. Unfortunately, the couple divorced a year later.
• The original title was "The Motorcycle Song," and it was a faster tune about "middle-aged dentists and insurance salesmen getting themselves in biker gear and buying Harleys."
• In 1992, we learned that Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough, and there is a similar theme in this song, as Joel looks for something to take the place when love fails, and he sings, "Under the love is the stronger emotion." Speaking with Newsday in 1993, Joel described it as, "The basic inner something which I refer to as soul, the inner core: what you call on when the s--t really comes down. Soul is what each person has within before there is love, or even after there is love."
• The vocal group Color Me Badd, which had a huge hit with their 1990 song "I Wanna Sex You Up," supplied guest vocals on this track.
• River Of Dreams is about Joel trying to regain his faith in himself and others after being betrayed by people he thought he could trust (his former brother-in-law/manager stole millions of dollars from the singer and his lawyers failed to protect him). This was one of the last songs Joel wrote for the album, and it finds him getting back to his old self.
  
  "The album kind of has an arc to it," he explained to Sirius XM in 2016. "It starts with a man whose faith has been shattered, and he slowly rebuilds his faith over the album when he rediscovers the things that are really important in life - his family, his friends, his own sense of self. And 'All About Soul' is about the latter part of the album, where faith is being rediscovered."