"My music is a synthesis of all the music that I like," Billy Joel says
on the
occasion of the release of RIVER OF DREAMS, an album that comes at
the midpoint
of a career that stretches back to the 1960s and points like a compass
into the
next century. "I mix all kinds of things: classical, Broadway, rock
'n roll, blues,
jazz, whatever's out there.
On RIVER OF DREAMS, Billy Joel and producer Danny Kortchmar (who has
worked with Don
Henley, Jon Bon Jovi, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young and others) assembled
a group of
musicians - including drummers Zachary Alford and Steve Jordan, bassists
T.M. Stevens
and Lonnie Hillyer, with Kortchmar and the legendary Mountain of sound
Leslie West on
quitars - to give the album a driving, hard-edged band-oriented sound.
"It sounds like he's playing with a rock band," says Kortchmar.
"It's his songs,
rendered with a real fire and intensity. It's not over-thought or over-produced.
Its
a real straight-ahead thing. Billy's first bands were all East
Coast rock bands in
the style of the Young Rascals and the Vagrants and so were my first
bands. We're
from the same school.
While parts of RIVER OF DREAMS reverberate with the energy of the Lost
Souls, and The
Hassles (Billy's Long Island teenage bands), the album's musical scope
incorpor-ates
classically-based melody lines, two orchestral arrangements by Ira
Newborn (on "Great
Wall Of China" and "It's All about Soul"), and blues-based horn charts
("A Minor Variation")
The genesis of RIVER OF DREAMS began in the summer '92, when Billy recorded
two
Elvis Presley tunes at the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and
Mary in
Southampton for the soundtrack album of Honeymoon In Vegas. Setting
up a studio
on Shelter Island, Billy spent that summer through September writing
and recording
an early ver-sion of RIVER OF DREAMS entitled "The Shelter Island Sessions."
While
making these recordings, Billy formed a working relationship with Kortchmar.
As the
project dev-eloped, Billy wound up re-recording the songs in a various
Long Island
and New York studios os .
A restless artist who sees every new project as a challenge and opportunity
for growth,
Billy assembles his records as a composer would a Broadway musical.
"Each album has a
theme," he says. "a totality to them." And, while each of his
songs is capable of
standing alone as a single (and many of them have become pop music
stand-ards a la
George Gershwin or Cole Porter), it s in the interlocking framework
of an album where
Billy Joel's vision comes into the clearest focus.
Like many of his other albums, RIVER OF DREAMS is a song-cycle; for
Billy, the album
represents a new "lyric stretch," a move into a more philosophic and
sometimes dark
mode of writing. While he s always drawn from personal experience
and cultural
observation in his writing, on RIVER OF DREAMS, Billy has been "somewhat
distanced
from a confessional type character," as he moves into lyrical terrain
that is both
personal and universal
"It s the story of a person who's in a crisis," Billy says about the
character
inhabiting the psychological through-line of RIVER OF DREAMS.
"It s obvious in the
first couple of songs that it s a pretty angry person." By the
end of the album --after
going through a series of emotionally moving, sometimes harrowing transforma-tions
-- the
character reestablishes his faith "in the things that really matter,
what s really
important, the things that sustain you.
Opening with the straight-ahead throb of "No Man s Land," Billy traces
the spiritual
wasteland of commodities culture to a logical moral impasse.
"The Great Wall Of China"
internalizes that dilemma, ironically juxtaposing a series of gritty
bar-band rock riffs
against neo-psychedelic orchestral synthesizer lines; the music echoes
the characters
inner struggle against the forces of betrayal. Sarcastically
lifting a quote from On
The Waterfront, Billy s character is "grasping for things to believe
in," in a seemingly
impossible situation.
As he gropes in the darkness of the soul for his lost values, the album
s protag-onist
finds himself suffocating in a post-modern claustrophobia where "the
TV works, but the
clickers broken." In the absence of love, he reaches out for the merely
sexual in "Blonde
Over Blue," a song that underscores the desperation which beats right
next to salvation in
the heart of rock 'n roll; Billy says the music here is "like Cream
meets Roy Orbison."
In "Minor Variation," the character succumbs to his melancholy, admitting
that, just like
anybody else, sometimes he just gets the blues. "There is a particular
kind of healing in
just giving in sometimes," Billy says of "A Minor Var-iation," the
pivotal song in RIVER
OF DREAMS s pilgrim's progress.
In "Shades Of Grey," he begins to see the black and white outlines of
youthful idealism
begin to blur. Things are no longer simple cases of right vs.
wrong. "The guy's stopped
looking for justice at this point," Billy says, "because if you're
going to believe in the
system of justice, the fairy-tale, you re going to be constantly disappointed.
You have to
believe in the things that really matter, the things that are really
and truly
substantial.
And then, in a sublime musical and lyrical turn, RIVER OF DREAMS "starts
becoming spiritual
at that point, it comes down to something deeper than what we understand."
In the case of
Billy's anti-hero, it's "All About Soul," an anthemic tune (featuring
Colour Me Badd on
back-up vocals) which resonates with the emotions that run much deeper
than the passionate
anger of the album s opening tunes. "I think the guy had to go
through a certain amount
of grieving and feeling the blues," Billy admits, "to see the things
that were really
important to him.
From there, RIVER OF DREAMS flows into "Lullabye (Goodnight, My Angel),"
the album's
quintessential emotional moment. As "the natural overture to
sleeping and dreaming,"
the lullabye provides an emotional comfort zone, as well as a segue
to the album's
primordial title track.
"River of Dreams" opens with "a tribal rhythm, primitive drumming, all
that tribal
medicine man stuff we separated ourselves from a long time ago."
The song becomes
a swelling torrent of the non-sequitur images and unresolved emotional
conflicts that
churn in the unconscious before welling up to dissolve in the security
of slumber.
Billy Joel sees a river as a conduit of thought and emotion as well
as something that
must be crossed. RIVER OF DREAMS is a reflection of the continuum
of life...raging in
torrential fury at one point and moving with serene grace at another.
The "River of Dreams" leads to "2000 years," the point where the album
s evolving
central character sees himself painted into the big canvas of history.
Summing it all
up, Billy Joel lifts another cinematic quote -- this time from Gone
With The Wind --closing
the album with "Famous Last Words," a bittersweet elegy that incorporates
the metaphor of
autumn, "the end of the season, the closing of the book."
It s been four years since Billy Joel's Storm Front, the triple-platinum
tour de force
which hit #1 on Billboard s single (the incendiary cultural critique
"We Didn t Start The
Fire") and album charts simultaneously, received five Grammy nominations
for said album
and single, and launched the record-breaking 15 month Storm Front tour
that put Billy in
front of 4.3 million fans via 174 shows in 16 countries, including
a gig in Berlin the day
after German reunification, another show in the Philippines for GIs
the day after Operation
Desert Storm kicked in, and the first-ever rock concert at Yankee Stadium.
Billy took a day off from the tour on December 5, 1990, to return home
to New York for the
dual honors of receiving the Humanitarian Award from the Cathedral
of St. John the Divine,
and the Grammy Legend Award. In 1991, he was awarded a Doctorate of
Humane Letters from
Fairfield University. The same year, Garth Brooks scored a #1
Country hit with Billy s
"Shameless.
In 1993, while working on RIVER OF DREAMS, the Berklee College of Music
in Boston conferred
the title Doctor of Music upon Billy Joel.
Prior to (and during) the recording of RIVER OF DREAMS, Billy immersed
himself in classical
music, listening to Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, Brahms, Ravel, Samuel
Bar-ber and other
composers. "What I was really trying to do was to break their
codes," Billy says. "If you
listen to something often enough, you begin to know instinctively why
it goes in a
particular direction. I don't know if I m essentially a rock
n roll artist. I live in
a stylistic no man's land. I've always believed that the beauty
of American music was its
ability to transcend and cross lines.
For the past 25 years, Billy Joel s albums, singles, live shows and
music videos have been
important parts of his fans lives and of American pop history.
Now, he s taking them along
on his journey across the RIVER OF DREAMS.
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