In the long history of rock acts playing arenas there’s never been anything remotely like Billy Joel’s residency at Madison Square Garden. Every single month since January of 2014, he’s headlined a sold-out show at the arena. At no point, have sales even tapered off a little bit even though the man hasn’t released an album of new pop songs since 1993.
“I’m having a lot of fun,” Joel recently told Pollstar. “People show up, we throw ‘em on the stage. We change up the set list, dive into the obscurities. We do covers, we do silly stuff. We try to be as spontaneous as possible. If I start to get an idea for a song that I want to do at the moment, not even my song, we just go ahead and do it.”
On January 11th, Joel will celebrate the five year anniversary of the residency and play the 60th show since it all began. Just hours before he plays the final show of 2018, we’ve taken a look at the stats up until this point and crunched the numbers on everything from the distance he travels every night to the arena to the number of bottles of Red Wine he’s called out from the stage.
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