By David Marchese
On a July morning, Billy Joel watches through the window of the study at his Long Island estate as a helicopter takes flight. “My wife had to go into the city today,” he says as the Joel family chopper ascends. He smiles. “Life is funny, isn’t it?” It’s a week before the singer and erstwhile songwriter’s record-setting 100th concert at Madison Square Garden and Joel, dressed in a baseball cap, black T-shirt, plaid shorts, and sneakers, plops down on a leather couch. “Life makes sense. It didn’t always used to, but now, pushing 70 years old, it does,” he says. “Getting ripped off, going to rehab, getting divorced, making albums and stopping — everything happened for a reason, even the bad shit.” He sips coffee from a takeout cup. “I’ve got to say, things worked out.”
Your old pal Elton John is retiring from the road. So is Paul Simon. But your Madison Square Garden residency is booked indefinitely. Do you understand the impulse to say, “These are the last shows I’ll ever do”?
No. There have been times when I’ve felt these are my last shows; it’s time for me to get off the bleeding stage. Then I just thought, nah.
