Billy Joel

Billy Joel (born 1949, in the Bronx) is one of the best-selling artists in history — “Piano Man,” “Just the Way You Are,” “Uptown Girl,” “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and roughly 160 million records sold. After 1993’s “River of Dreams” he famously stopped releasing new pop songs, settling into a record-breaking Madison Square Garden residency instead.

An AI time machine for a 17-year comeback

When Joel finally broke his songwriting silence in February 2024 with “Turn the Lights Back On,” his first new single in 17 years, he put AI at the center of the moment. The video, directed by Warren Fu and Freddy Wexler, used deepfake technology from Deep Voodoo — the AI studio spun out of South Park’s creators — to de-age the 74-year-old through his ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s incarnations at the piano, each era-authentic version singing the new song.

In a rare CNN interview with Fareed Zakaria that March, Joel was unreserved about the experience, saying the technology let a lifelong camera-shy performer appear on screen without the “labor of the videomaking” — “I was kind of hiding behind those characters.” Rather than worrying the synthetic Joels diluted the real one, he found watching himself move through time “very moving.”

The video drew enormous attention — a Grammy-night premiere, tens of millions of views, and its share of uncanny-valley criticism from viewers who found the de-aged faces unsettling. Joel’s embrace was personal and artistic rather than programmatic; he has not positioned himself as an AI evangelist, but he chose the technology for the most visible comeback of his late career.