Billy Joel hasn’t released a new single for the longest time....Oh, ohhh, oh. For the longest time.
But that will soon change with the Piano Man announcing Monday that his new song titled "Turn the Lights Back On" will debut on Feb. 1.
For Joel - a six-time Grammy winner whose last pop album was "River of Dreams" in 1993 - it will be his first new single since 2007.
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The song, according to Monday's press release from Columbia Records, is a “classic Billy Joel-style tune, embodying the hallmarks of his signature sound and ushering in the next chapter of his story. In the lyrics, he asks, ‘Did I wait too long… to turn the lights back on?'”
Joel, the fourth-best-selling solo artist in the United States, first hinted at the possibly of new material during his concert on Dec. 19 at Madison Square Garden.
“I have good news and bad news,” Joel told the crowd during the show. “I’ll give you the bad news first. We don’t have anything new to play for you. The good news is you don’t have to sit through something you have no idea what it is. Although, we got a little something we’re working on you might hear sometime.”
Speculation continued Sunday after the cover photo on Joel's Facebook page was changed to a picture with the words, "Did I wait too long..."
The announcement of the new single was then made Monday, with a tease of Joel playing the piano.
The song - which Joel wrote with Freddy Wexler, Arthur Bacon and Wayne Hector - will be available on all streaming platforms and on a limited-edition vinyl. A lyric video will also be released on Joel's official YouTube channel. Joel has not yet announced if more material, or even a full pop album, are to follow.
YouTube and streaming did not exist when Joel's last studio album - the classical piano collection "Fantasies & Delusions" - was released in 2001.
Joel did not release a single with lyrics until the 2007 ballad "All My Life," which he wrote for his then-wife Katie Lee. Later that year, Joel's song "Christmas in Fallujah" was released with Cass Dillon on lead vocals. A live version of the song, with Joel on vocals, was released in 2008.
Joel has toured extensively despite the lack of new material, selling out venues and filling set lists with his many crowd-pleasing hits like "Piano Man" and "We Didn't Start the Fire."
Joel, who is set to play at the Tokyo Dome in Japan later this week, announced in June that he would end his historic monthly residency at Madison Square Garden, during which he has performed one show per month at the New York venue since January 2014. Joel will play his final MSG residency show on July 25, which will be his 150th career show at the venue, the most of any musical artist.
The Piano Man has seen the lights go out on Broadway, but he has turned the lights back on in the studio.
