Watch: Billy Joel de-ages in A.I.-powered music video for 'Turn the Lights Back On'
Billy Joel performs at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 4 in Los Angeles. Credit: Getty Images for The Recording Academy / John Shearer
Billy Joel released a video Friday for “Turn the Lights Back On,” his first single in 17 years.
Actually, make that Billy Joels, plural.
The video, available for viewing on YouTube, features Joel sitting at his trusty Steinway piano on a dark stage in an opulent concert hall. But as the song progresses, the 74-year-old singer we know today — bald, with a gray goatee — transforms into different incarnations of his younger self. For fans, the video should be a photorealistic trip down memory lane that harks back to some of Joel’s most iconic eras.
One outfit, a tweed blazer with a white collared shirt and a loosened necktie, recalls Joel’s “Piano Man” days in the early 1970s. It’s followed by a black leather jacket with elastic cuffs, surely inspired by the one Joel wore on the cover of “Glass Houses,” his 1980 response to punk and New Wave. There’s also a version of Joel wearing a blazer and classic Ray-Ban sunglasses, a look he favored in the later years of his recording career.
The younger versions of Joel, complete with his famously unruly black hair, are impressively realistic — at times unnervingly so. According to a news release from Sony, the video was made with Deep Voodoo, an entertainment-focused A.I. startup launched in 2022 by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the creators of “South Park”). It’s the same deepfake technology that rapper Kendrick Lamar used to transform himself into such notorious celebrities as O.J. Simpson and Jussie Smollett in his 2022 video “The Heart Part 5.”
Joel’s new song and video are part of a profile-raising media blitz, including an appearance at the Grammys, as he approaches several significant milestones. On March 28, the singer will play the 100th show of his residency at Madison Square Garden, a record-breaking run that has sold out every date. On April 14, CBS will air the concert as a special. On May 9, Joel celebrates his 75th birthday with a residency performance at the venue. And on July 25, he’ll play his lifetime 150th show at the Garden, marking the end of his residency and freeing him to tour with Sting and Rod Stewart.
“Turn the Lights Back On” has performed well on radio, reaching No. 1 on the Classic Rock chart and No. 8 on the Adult Contemporary chart, according to Sony. It’s also Joel’s first song to reach the Billboard Hot 100 (it’s currently at No. 62) since his 1997 cover of Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love.”
