Famous Last Words

By the time Billy Joel came to record River Of Dreams, he had become disillusioned with the music business. He sings on the album's closing track: These are the last words I have to say That's why this took so long to write There will be other words some other day But that's the story of my life Co-producer Danny Kortchmar explained in Mojo magazine: "He was intimating that he might be running out of ideas and becoming less happy with writing pop songs. That's why the last song on the album is called 'Famous Last Words.'"

For a while, it looked like these really were Joel's famous last words, as he essentially retired from songwriting after the release of the album (with rare exceptions like "All My Life" and "Christmas In Fallujah"). He didn't realize he made that decision until he actually read what he wrote. He told Sirius XM in 2016: "By the time I was finishing writing the material on the River Of Dreams album, I felt like I had come to the end of a book that I was writing. I even refer to that in the song 'Famous Last Words.' Without me sitting down and intending, 'Okay, this is my last song,' I just started to write like that, and that was the subject matter. I didn't really know that I was at the end of a songwriting career until I wrote the song. I kind of re-read the lyrics and I went, 'Oh, I guess I'm done.' I don't see it as a sad song, I just see at as, well, that's the end of this book. 'Cause I even left the door open for other things to happen that might turn into songs. I've never slammed the door shut and said, 'I'll never write songs again.' I just don't know. But I just felt like, I wanna do something else."

These weren't Billy Joel's last words. In 2024 he released a new single he wrote called "Turn The Lights Back On." The video, which uses AI to show Joel performing the song throughout his career, starts with the computer-generated Joel flipping his notebook from the "Famous Last Words" lyric sheet to a blank page.