Click to see more photos from Billy Joel's concert at Bridgestone Arena (photo: Caitlin Harris for The Tennessean)
By Heidi Hall
hhall@tennessean.com
At this point, any review of Billy Joel is less a critique and more a recounting — for the folks who didn’t make the show — of which songs he chose to perform and anything unusual that happens.
To get it out of the way: Nothing unusual happened Friday night at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. Joel drew a sold-out crowd of rabid, sing-along fans and put on a two-hour show that thrilled.
Joel spent three decades as a hitmaker, throwing the brakes on pop music writing after 1993’s “River of Dreams.” His Nashville performances began in the 1970s with Exit/In, he said Friday. After that much practice, Joel is so comfortable on an arena stage he may as well still be playing that immortalized East Coast venue where the microphone smells like a beer.
He started the night with “Miami 2017” but brought the crowd to its feet with the second number, “Pressure.” By then, he’d taken several rotations with his grand piano on a slowly spinning section of center stage, playing beneath a shattered Jumbotron of various-sized, mostly vertical panels.
Click to see more photos from Billy Joel's concert at Bridgestone Arena (photo: Caitlin Harris for The Tennessean)
“That was it for the special effects,” he deadpanned. “The piano goes this way, the piano goes that way ...”
There was plenty of banter as he sipped from a Billy Joel in Concert coffee mug and dramatically applied throat spray between numbers, which apparently works wonders, because — at 64 — his voice sounded as strong as ever. He suggested Ted Nugent uses the same spray and should stick it ... somewhere unmentionable in a family newspaper. He also poked fun at former tourmate Elton John — the two parted ways before the end of their last run — doing a dead-on impression for a couple bars of “Your Song.”
The Bridgestone crowd got a chance to go a cappella during “She’s Always a Woman” and earned props from Joel: “This is Music City.”
Also earning his praise — and wild cheers from the audience — was Nashville resident Crystal Taliefero, alternately found on percussion, saxophone and vocals.
Joel hopped among decades and saved his energy for a one-after-the-other string of hits during the encore: “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “Uptown Girl,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” “Big Shot,” “You May Be Right” and “Only the Good Die Young.”
His opening act was fellow piano man Jon McLaughlin.
