
Billy Joel will bring his one-show-a-month residency at New York’s Madison Square Garden, which started in January 2014, to an end this Thursday.
The final show raises his overall total of Garden performances to 150, and 116th in the residency. Here’s Billy Joel on winding up his MSG residency.
“I’m kind of flabbergasted that it did last as long as it did. My team tells me that we could continue to sell tickets, but 10 years, 150 shows – alright already! Seems like a nice number.”
Joel says ending the residency will free him up to play other venues in and around New York City. “We can play stadiums. Yankee Stadium, Giants Stadium, Citi Field, where the Mets play, so there’s plenty of that lined up. I’m not going to stop doing shows. That’s what I do. We have a whole schedule laid out into 2025, where we’re going to be playing.”
And, despite turning 75 in May, he has no plans to retire. “What else am I going to do? Stop doing shows and sit around, and watch TV, and turn into a vegetable? No. I don’t want to do that.”
Throughout the course of his MSG run, Joel has sold more than 1.6 million tickets, and was joined by numerous special guests — including Steve Miller, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Brian Johnson, Tony Bennett, Paul Simon, Billy Gibbons, Elvis Costello, and Foreigner‘s Lou Gramm and Mick Jones, who he inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013.
REUTERS PHOTO