Billy Joel

On turning 70, writing music he won’t record, Donald Trump, and why he’ll never do a farewell tour.

- Andy Greene

Billy Joel hasn’t released an album of new pop songs since 1993, but that hasn’t stopped him from selling out Madison Square Garden every month for the past five years and packing baseball stadiums across the country each summer. “I’ve gone onstage and said, ‘I don’t have anything new for you, so we’re just going to play the old shit,’ ” Joel says on the phone from his house in Palm Beach, Florida. “And the audience goes, ‘Yeah!’ I’ll be sitting in the stadium looking out at 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 people, thinking, ‘What the hell are they all doing here? Why now?’ I guess, in a way, I’m an anachronism. There aren’t that many of me left. There’s a rarity to it, which gives it value.”

Are you looking forward to playing the Garden on your 70th birthday in May?

I got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I’m happy to be alive. On the other hand, I don’t know how much of a party I deserve just for making it to 70. I mean, it’s a work night — you can’t have birthday cake, you can’t do any of that stuff.

Still, 70 is a milestone.

This is a Peter Pan kinda job. You start out, and you’re young, and you’re rockin’ and rollin’, and that’s what you do all your life. You become a little myopic about how old you actually are. I see pictures of myself at the Garden recently, and I go, “That don’t look right.” I got old, I lost my hair. I was never a matinee idol to begin with, and there I am onstage still doing the same job I was doing when I was 16.