“I thought I’d had my say,” he told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in 2017. His legion of fans, and his many admiring music industry collaborators, might look at Joel’s 12 albums-an extraordinarily deep 121-song catalog of ballads, bangers, meditations, and mood-enhancers that includes 33 hits and twice that many crowd pleasers-and feel there must still be music left to write. Perhaps because he is so beloved and because his old songs have so successfully stood the test of time, and because he is absurdly wealthy and getting wealthier, Joel has expressed no regrets about his career choice. Madison Square Garden refers to itself as the world’s most famous arena, and Billy Joel is the house band. A banner with his name and the number 80 was raised to the Garden rafters to hang beside the retired jerseys of great Rangers and Knicks. The show sells out each month, with every decent seat gone within hours of on-sale, and at each show the crowd sings along with every word of every song. In 2022, Joel was recognized for having played his 80th consecutive monthly gig (with a pause for COVID, of course) at Madison Square Garden. He performs 25 live shows a year, sometimes more. That’s especially true when the songs are as superb and sturdy as Billy Joel’s are. But you can play the same songs-and exactly the same is what most audiences want-over and over, and people will come to hear them. You can’t retell the same jokes indefinitely, nor write the same book twice, nor reenact the very same roles. 1 on the Billboard charts, received four Grammy nominations, and went quintuple platinum. Joel’s final contemporary album, 1993’s River of Dreams (its intentionally prophetic final track is titled “Famous Last Words”), reached No. The following is excerpted from LIFE’s new special tribute issue Billy Joel: 50 Years of the Piano Man, available at newsstands and online:įor decades, the principal narrative of Billy Joel’s career has revolved around the fact that in the mid-1990s, at the height of one of the most fruitful and accomplished runs of songwriting in popular music history, he stopped recording new songs.
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