In a new interview with music producer Rick Beato, Joel said that when he finished writing 1993's River of Dreams, something in him simply stopped. He didn't want to sit down and start another album from scratch. He had a wife and a young daughter, and the old life of disappearing into songwriting for months at a time no longer made sense to him.
The bigger fear, Joel explained, was what happens to artists who don't know when to stop. He said some musicians keep releasing albums well past their creative peak, and that doing so can end up diluting an artist's legacy rather than adding to it. "I didn't want to go like that," he said. Rather than risk it, he chose to walk away from pop songwriting after River of Dreams.
That didn't mean he stopped making music. Joel described turning instead to a full album of classical piano compositions, something he said he'd wanted to do for years. Because he doesn't read musical notation in the traditional sense, he said he taught the pieces to a classical pianist section by section, and the pianist then performed the completed compositions live in Europe, including in Germany, Austria and Spain.
Throughout the conversation, Joel traced that instinct for knowing when a song, or an era, is finished back to his earliest years learning piano by ear in his mother's house on Long Island, and to his lifelong habit of tearing apart his own performances in the studio rather than settling for good enough. He said a producer once had to talk him into keeping a piano solo he was ready to scrap, and that his own harshest critic has always been himself. More than three decades after River of Dreams, Joel has continued to perform live regularly, including a long-running residency at Madison Square Garden, without releasing another pop album. His decision to stop writing new pop material while continuing to tour has become a defining part of how he's discussed among musicians and songwriters who cite him as an influence.
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