See Billy Joel transform into his '70s, '80s, '90s selves in 'Turn the Lights Back On' video
Billy Joel’s music video for “Turn the Lights Back On” is here.
The video, which was released on Friday, starts with a shot of the sheet music of "Famous Last Words," the last song on Billy's last pop album, 1993's “River of Dreams.” It then shows him performing the song in the present day on an empty stage in a theater.
As he continues to sing the song, he suddenly transforms into how he looked in the '70s, and then he turns into '80s-era Billy, around the time of "Uptown Girl." Next, he's wearing shades and looks like he did in the early '90s. As the clip ends, Billy is back to the way he looks now, and we see real-life footage of him through the years.
According to a press release about the video, Joel’s physical transformation through the different decades of his life in the video was achieved by “groundbreaking technology” from a company called Deep Voodoo to show the singer as the 74-year-old man he is today to the man he was in the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
The video for "Turn the Lights Back On" was co-directed by Freddy Wexler, who also produced the song and co-wrote it with Joel, Arthur Bacon and Wayne Hector.
Since the song was released earlier this month, Joel has returned to the Billboard Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts — as an artist, not just a writer — for the first time since 1998.
Joel also performed his new song at the Grammys earlier this month.
