Billy Joel’s “Flip the Lights Again On” returns the legendary singer-songwriter to the Billboard Scorching 100, because it debuts on the chart dated Feb. 17 at No. 62. The music — Joel’s first single launch in 17 years — marks his first entry on the chart because the survey dated Oct. 11, 1997, when he wrapped the run of his model of Bob Dylan’s “To Make You Really feel My Love.”
Joel returns to the Scorching 100 only one week shy of the fiftieth anniversary of his first look on the chart: on the record dated Feb. 23, 1974, he debuted at No. 94 together with his breakthrough hit “Piano Man,” which went on to peak at No. 25. Amongst his 43 profession Scorching 100 entries together with “Flip the Lights Again On,” he has banked 13 high 10s, together with three No. 1s: “It’s Nonetheless Rock and Roll to Me” (for 2 weeks in 1980), “Inform Her About It” (one week, 1983) and “We Didn’t Begin the Fireplace” (two weeks, 1989).
“Flip the Lights Again On” enters the Scorching 100 following its first full week of monitoring (Feb. 2-8), after it was launched at 7 a.m. ET Thursday, Feb. 1, on Columbia Data. Additional boosted by Joel’s efficiency of the piano ballad on the Grammy Awards on Feb. 4, it debuts with 5.1 million in radio viewers, 4.5 million official streams and 22,000 mixed bodily (by way of 7” vinyl) and digital singles bought within the U.S., in keeping with Luminate. It concurrently jumps 11-5 on the Digital Track Gross sales chart.
Notably, Joel, who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in 1999, appeared as a author on the Scorching 100 amid his quarter-century-plus break from the chart as a recording artist: the Glee Forged’s covers of his classics “Solely the Good Die Younger” and “Uptown Lady” hit Nos. 50 and 68 in 2010 and 2011, respectively, whereas Fall Out Boy’s replace of “We Didn’t Begin the Fireplace” reached No. 94 final July. (Plus, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” shouts-out “Uptown Lady” and Joel himself; each his authentic “Uptown Lady,” in 1983, and “Deja Vu,” in 2021, hit No. 3. The pair carried out each songs collectively at Madison Sq. Backyard in New York in August 2022.)
“Flip the Lights Again On” was written by Joel, Arthur Bacon, Wayne Hector and Freddy Wexler. (Hector has co-written 5 high 5 Scorching 100 hits, starting with O-City’s “All or Nothing” in 2001, whereas Wexler co-wrote Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber’s 2020 No. 1 “Caught With U.”)
“The melody, the chords, the chord development, even the time signature was one thing that struck me instantly, and that’s how I relate to music,” Joel mentioned of how he reacted to what Wexler was engaged on. “This explicit lyric on this music, I’ve had these ideas, I may have written these lyrics verbatim. I’ve chewed on these phrases and I’ve considered these phrases, and I’ve mentioned these phrases earlier than. It was all type of falling into place – and who am I to combat that?”
Joel has solo-written 40 of his 43 Scorching 100 hits as a recording artist, with “Flip the Lights Again On” serving as his first charted co-write. Along with the Dylan-penned “To Make You Really feel My Love,” Joel reached the rating in 1992 together with his cowl of Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up,” which Presley wrote with Otis Blackwell.
