Recomendamos: Billy Joel Resumes Monthly Madison Square Garden Residency With Magical Evening of Hits and Fan Favorites, for Andy Greene

“I want to thank you for waiting since March of 2020,” Joel told the crowd. “Sorry we had to shut everything down, but now we’re back!”

Over the past few months, Broadway theaters have welcomed back live audiences, long-shuttered restaurants have reopened in all five New York boroughs, and eager tourists have repopulated Times Square. But New York didn’t truly feel like its pre-pandemic self until Friday night when the lights dimmed at Madison Square Garden, the theme from The Natural swelled throughout the arena, and Billy Joel stepped onto the stage to resume his monthly residency after Covid forced him to take an unplanned 20-month break.

“Good evening, New York City!” he said early in the night. “We’re back at the Garden. I want to thank you for waiting since March of 2020. Sorry we had to shut everything down, but now we’re back!”

The show began with the familiar opening notes of “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway).” The sci-fi song about New York City descending into an apocalyptic wasteland has been dragged out at special shows marking everything from 9/11 to Superstorm Sandy, but the lyrics have rarely felt this appropriate. When Joel wrote the tune in 1976, he predicted that the Broadway lights would turn out in 2017. He was just three years off.

The set list was largely familiar to anyone who’s seen Joel at MSG since he started playing monthly shows there in January 2014, but the long layoff breathed new life into well-worn tunes like “My Life,” “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “Allentown,” and “Pressure.” Even the non-hits like “All for Leyna,” “Everybody Loves You Now,” and “Sometimes a Fantasy” were greeted with thunderous applause. It felt like seeing old friends after years apart. (Taking in the show, it would have been easy to forget we were still in the middle of a pandemic: Few masks or any other sign of Covid protection were seen aside from the rigorous vaccine check required for entry.)

After “She’s Always a Woman,” Joel paused to address a particularly befuddling lyric in the song. “I’m still trying to figure out what that line means,” he said. “‘She can’t be convicted/She’s earned her degree.’ I don’t think a degree is getting anybody out of jail. What the hell was I talking about? She can’t be convicted? She can’t be expelled. She can’t get detention. She’s earned her degree? But she was always a woman to me!”

On a more serious note, he dedicated “New York State of Mind” to Neil Skow, a New York City fireman who served on 9/11. His helmet rested on Joel’s piano for the entire night. “I had this on the piano when we did the [Concert for New York City] after 9/11,” Joel said. “I thought we should have it here tonight.”

Joel lost 50 pounds during the pandemic, making it seem like he aged in reverse during the downtime, and he also got some unexpected love from Gen Z thanks to Olivia Rodrigo’s “Uptown Girl” callout in her hit “Deja Vu” and TikTok teens turning his 1978 deep cut “Zanzibar” into a dance craze. (That may be hard to believe, but check it out. More than 320,000 different “Zanzibar” videos have popped up during the past few months, and the average age of the participants couldn’t be much higher than 18. The internet is a weird place.)

More information in: Rolling Stone