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Billy Joel, newcomer go to war with Christmas song
12/03/2007 4:00 PM, Reuters
Jonathan Cohen
Billy Joel has broken his
self-imposed retirement from pop for the second time in a year,
but he'd almost rather you didn't know that.
The second new Joel-penned single since his last pop album,
1993's "River of Dreams," is called "Christmas in Fallujah" and
hits iTunes December 4. There are two major differences between
it and the classics that have made him one of the best-selling
artists of all time. First, there's no piano on it, and second,
there's barely any Billy Joel on it, either.
Instead, for what Joel says is a first, he's written a song
expressly for another singer, a 21-year-old Long Island native
named Cass Dillon. Joel tells Billboard the inspiration for
"Fallujah" was partly born of letters he's received from
service personnel overseas, but also simply from years of the
realities of war.
The song came to him quickly, Joel says, as did the
realization that he wasn't the guy to record it. "I thought
someone with a young voice should be singing this, someone just
starting out in life," he says. "Plus, you know, I'm 58 years
old. My voice isn't the voice I was thinking of when I was
writing; I was thinking of a soldier, someone of that age."
Enter Dillon, a young singer/songwriter who'd spent a few
years under the wing of Tommy Byrnes, Joel's longtime musical
director. Dillon left college two years ago to pursue a musical
career, and has spent the intervening years on the
coffee-shops-and-bars circuit. Byrnes had played Joel several
of Dillon's songs, and when it came time to find a singer for
"Fallujah," Joel says Dillon "popped right into my head."
Reuters/Billboard
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