Billy Joel‘s epic, decade-long residency at New York’s Madison Square Garden had to end someday. And on Thursday (June 1) the 74-year-old piano man was joined by New York Mayor Eric Adams for a press conference announcing the beginning of that end.
After kicking off the run in January 2014, after nearly 150 shows and more than 1.6 million tickets sold, the final 10-show spree will kick-off on Oct. 20. “There’s only one thing that’s more New York than Billy Joel — and that’s a Billy Joel concert at MSG,” Mayor Adams said in a written statement before a gathering that also featured MSG CEO James Dolan. “For more than 50 years, Billy’s music has defined our city and brought us together. On behalf of 8.5 million New Yorkers, congratulations, Billy, on a historic run of sold-out shows at MSG, and thank you for a lifetime of bringing joy to us all.”
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Dolan praised Joel for making MSG, and music industry history with the decade-long series of capacity shows. “150 sold out lifetime shows is a remarkable achievement, and speaks to Billy’s extraordinary talent, beloved catalog, and dedicated fanbase,” said Dolan in a statement. “Billy always has a home here at MSG even though the residency is coming to an end with his 150th lifetime performance.”
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“If you google Billy Joel’s house, they showed Madison Square Garden, which is kind of cool,” Joel quipped during a press conference on Thursday. “I never found my bedroom though.” Dolan added that the residency “exceeded even our wildest dreams” and that a run of shows like Joel’s was “never gonna happen again.”
Joel’s residency was announced nearly a decade ago, in December 2013. After the first performance, in January 2014, the singer went on to set Madison Square Garden records: Most Lifetime Performances By Any Artist (136 shows) and Most Consecutive Performances (90 shows). Joel hasn’t released an album of fresh pop songs since 1993, but in 2018, he told The New York Times that his touring business “is bigger now than it was at the height of my recording career.”
In 2006 he set the venue record for most consecutive performances by an artist with 12 gigs in a row, which was celebrated with a Joel-12 banner getting raised to the building’s rafters. He began the residency in Jan. 2014 by playing one how a month as long as fans kept showing up. And they did, with Joel breaking his own 12-show record within a year, then hitting his 100th lifetime gig in July 2018, prompting then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to dub July 18, 2018 “Billy Joel Day.”
The idea for Joel’s residency was born after he was recovering from hip surgery. “I hadn’t really done a tour since 2010,” the singer told Billboard in 2014. “I played Jazzfest in New Orleans in 2012, a one-off in Australia at some bizarre festival in Sydney, I didn’t really start thinking about working again until I played at the 12-12-12 concert for Hurricane Sandy Relief at the Garden.”
Following that performance, Joel continued, “the Garden contacted my agent Dennis Arfa and said we’d like to do a series of shows with Billy Joel at the Garden. They didn’t refer to it as a franchise at first, it was a residency. I heard that and thought, ‘hmm, that’s kinda cool… all I gotta do is commute.’”
Fans were quick to snap up tickets. “I guess they looked at the ticket demand once it was announced and thought, ‘wait a minute, this guy can keep playing here for the rest of his natural life,’” Joel joked.
After the 100th performance in 2018, he told The New York Times he didn’t think he would keep the residency going long enough to play 200 shows. “I’m still exhausted from the other night, which didn’t used to happen,” Joel said. “I don’t think I’ll have the physical wherewithal to do it five years from now.”
“If I can’t do it as well I want to, I’ll take myself out of the lineup,” he added. “I love the game too much to not play it well.”
Tickets for the final MSG shows will go on sale to the general public beginning at 10 a.m. ET on June 9 through Ticketmaster and at the MSG box office the following day; click here for more information.