There’s a pause before Billy Joel steps onstage each night when he makes the subtle transition from low-key Everyman to world-renowned Piano Man. It’s just a few minutes of “not talking to anybody, not seeing anybody,” he said, mimicking waving off potential distractions. He makes sure he can hit his high notes. Then the roar of the crowd does the rest.
“When you walk onstage and they go ‘ye-ahhhhhh,’ that psyches you out,” he added, bellowing into his computer during a video call from his Sag Harbor, Long Island home. “You can’t get yourself there without that happening.”
On Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, that screech was supercharged, as a crowd of nearly 19,000 welcomed its hometown hero for the 104th and final concert of a historic monthly residency. For 10 years — minus a lengthy pause for Covid shutdowns — Joel has regularly sold out the Manhattan arena with a show featuring hits and deep cuts from his pop albums released from 1971 to 1993. In February, “Turn the Lights Back On,” his first new song in nearly 20 years, joined the set list.
Joel, 75, promised to keep the show running as long as there was demand. “The demand never stopped,” Dennis Arfa, his agent, said in a phone interview. So an end was selected: his 150th gig at the venue overall. In total, the run grossed more than $260 million with attendance nearing two million, according to the trade publication Pollstar.
“I never said I wasn’t going to perform anymore,” Joel made clear in the first of two interviews, this one at his Oyster Bay, Long Island estate in January. (He already has six stadium dates on the books through November.) While his fans went into overdrive as the finale approached — exhibits at the Garden and the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, a SiriusXM radio station devoted to his music, a major spike in ticket prices on StubHub, merch galore — Joel, in his typical manner, was more relaxed.
In the video call seven days before the show, he simply said he was “Feeling fine” about the gig, tucking a thick circular vape pen between his fingers like a cigar. “I mean, that’s my job,” he said. “This is a good job.”