Billy Joel talks about fame, fortune and the future

Billy Joel hasn’t made a new album since River of Dreams topped the US charts in 1993, and he’s fine with that.

“You get to a point where you realise: ‘I’ve done the best I can. Why am I driving myself crazy?’,” Joel says. “As Clint Eastwood put it [in the 1973 movie Magnum Force]: ‘A man’s gotta know his limitations’.”

Joel’s only post-1993 album, 2001’s Fantasies & Delusions: Music for Solo Piano, was an all-instrumental collection with a clear stylistic debt to Beethoven, Chopin and other classical music icons. It was not a commercial success, and Joel seems fine with that, too.

“I never wanted to be an oldies act, but I suppose I am,” he says. “I never wanted to be a nostalgia act, but I suppose I am. But I listen to Beethoven, and that’s really old stuff. Is that nostalgia? To me, that music is as alive as it ever was.”

Even without any new albums or songs, Joel continues to be one of the biggest concert draws in the world. A pop-radio staple for decades, he scored 33 consecutive Top 40 hits, beginning with 1973’s autobiographical Piano Man. Since then, he has sold close to 150 million albums worldwide and won six Grammys, but fans hoping for a new album will probably keep waiting – in the words of his 1984 hit – for the longest time.

“I’d recorded 12 albums, and I was content, to an extent,” Joel says. “Then I got to a point where I thought, ‘OK, I’m not compelled to do this anymore’. I know a lot of people may not understand why. Elton John used to say to me, ‘Why don’t you make some new albums?’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you make less new albums?’”