Songfacts®:

• Three years after the collapse of the USSR, which signified the end of the Cold War, Joel was looking at the forthcoming new millennium through rose-colored glasses when he wrote this track from his 1993 album, River Of Dreams.
  
  "I was very hopeful when I wrote that song," he told Sirius XM in 2016. "Hopeful to the point of being extremely naive. I had all these great predictions about how science and poetry would rule in the new era, and I was just very optimistic about the future, and then, boom, what happened? 9/11 - which was just such an inhumane, horrendous act. It really took me down, and this is just how optimistic I was before all that happened, then recognized things really aren't going to change all that much. It was a wake-up."
• River Of Dreams is Joel's fourth #1 album in the US. His first chart-topper was 1978's 52nd Street.
• The album was nominated for Album of the Year at the 1994 Grammy Awards but lost to The Bodyguard soundtrack. That movie's big number was "I Will Always Love You," sung by its star Whitney Houston, which bested "The River Of Dreams" in the Record of the Year category.