Songfacts®:

• Billy Joel is from Long Island, and this is his comment on suburban life - how people have become detached and materialistic as strip malls and other developments took over.
• The lyrics, "Lots more to read about Lolita and suburban lust" refer to Amy Fisher, who was known as "The Long Island Lolita." When she was 17, she was having an affair with the much older Joey Buttafuoco when she shot and injured his wife, Mary Jo. The story was very sensationalistic and got lots of media attention, including multiple made-for-TV movies. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Nicole - Massapequa, NY
• Joel performed this song in 1993 when he was the musical guest on David Letterman's first show after moving from NBC to CBS. Joel explained how his wife, Christie Brinkley, painted the River Of Dreams album cover. "She disappeared for about two weeks upstairs, it was kind of lonely, and said, 'I'm going to paint the album cover.' And I thought, 'What if I don't like it? How do I say I don't like it?' But, she brought it down and it was good."
• Joel's ire over suburban sprawl reached biblical proportions. He told Entertainment Weekly in 1993, "When I wrote 'No Man's Land,' I was feeling like an Old Testament prophet, shaking my fist at the sky, saying, 'The whole thing's corrupt! We're all damned!'"
• This was the album's second single. It reached #18 on the Mainstream Rock chart.
• River Of Dreams is Joel's last studio album of rock music. Although he still composes instrumental music - he released the classical album Fantasies & Delusions in 2001 - he no longer writes lyrics. He told Howard Stern in 2021, "I stopped writing songs because I couldn't be as good as I wanted to be. It became too aggravating, it became too frustrating, so I stopped." He added, "I just haven't had a desire to do it."