Songfacts®:

• "Turn The Lights Back On" is Billy Joel's first solo song with lyrics in 17 years. The piano ballad, co-written by Joel with Freddy Wexler (Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande), Arthur Bacon and Wayne Hector (Nicki Minaj, One Direction), is a love song that also serves as a self-reflection and an apology to his fans for his long songwriting absence. Wexler also produced the track.
• Joel's strong, raw voice and warm piano communicate his feelings of nostalgia, regret and hope. He wonders if he has waited too long to turn the lights back on, both in his personal life and in his musical career. It's a heartfelt mea culpa to fans and a glimpse into Joel's own soul.
• Billy Joel stopped writing songs after finishing his album River Of Dreams in 1993. The only exceptions were two songs released in 2007: "All My Life," which he wrote for his then-wife, Katie Lee, and "Christmas In Fallujah," written by Joel and performed by Cass Dillon. He hasn't entirely been out of the spotlight during that time. The Piano Man has been a mainstay on the performance circuit, with numerous concerts at New York City's Madison Square Garden.
  
  So why had it taken him so long to bring out new material? "It was fun. Music is fun. Rock n' roll was fun. It was all about having fun - and I kind of lost that and I turned the lights off because it wasn't fun anymore," he explained to Freddy Wexler on Audacy Check In. "I studiously avoided it because songwriting had become painful. 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."
• Back in 2022, Freddy Wexler played Joel some tracks he was working on, and Billy's love for creating new music began to return. "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," Joel said. "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?"
• Billy Joel plays the piano and Freddy Wexler bass guitar, percussion, keyboards and synthesizer. The other musicians are:
  
  Leroy Clampitt: guitar, bass guitar
  Randy Cooke: drums
  Marco Parisi: piano, strings
  Benjamin Jacobson: violin
  Tereza Stanislav: violin
  Luke Maurer: viola
  Vanessa Freebairn-Smith: cello
• Billy Joel performed the song for the first time at the Grammy Awards in 2024. He returned to close out the show with "You May Be Right."
• "Turn the Lights Back On" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 dated February 17, 2024 at #62. Joel's previous entry on the chart was his version of Bob Dylan's "Make You Feel My Love," which peaked at #50 in the fall of 1997.
• Asked by Billboard where the song's theme of rekindling a lost love came from, Freddy Wexler replied: "It came from my observation that even the greatest couples go through highs and lows, and sometimes it takes too long to realize they've lost 'sight' of one other."
• The time-tripping music video directed by Warren Fu (Daft Punk, Dua Lipa) uses artificial intelligence to show Billy Joel performing the song through the decades. It starts with his avatar turning a page in his notebook from the song "Famous Last Words" to a blank page. "Famous Last Words" is the last song on his 1993 album River Of Dreams, the last non-classical album he released.