THAT's how you do it

You don’t often find Billy Joel and AC/DC in the same sentence.

But there’s a concert of Joel’s at Madison Square Garden in 2014 where he brings on AC/DC’s singer Brian Johnson.

The occasion was clearly a bit of a shock for his fans.

If you’re expecting ‘She’s Always a Woman’ meets the ‘Piano Man’, you’re not expecting ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.

Still, that’s what they got.

In his intro, Billy describes seeing AC/DC at the Roseland Theatre as “maybe the best band I ever saw in my life”.

Checking dates, he must have meant the show they did there in 2003 two years after their Stiff Upper Lip arena tour ended. They called it a ‘club show’.

He then welcomes Brian Johnson to the stage, who ambles on, all Geordie bonhomie. Then off they go.

To be honest, the band murder the song. It’s too slow, the guitarist’s out of tune and there’s zero swing.

But Brian just smiles away and knocks the vocal out of the park.

Within a minute, the previously sedate audience are up on their feet yelling back the lyrics.

At the end, he sticks his microphone in his belt, shakes the hand of everyone on stage and slides off.

Billy Joel surveys his awestruck band and ramped-up audience, takes a sip of what looks like tea and then summarises:

“That’s how you do it.”

Watch it here.

Another surprising thing about Billy Joel is he stopped writing songs over 30 years ago.

Whenever asked why, he normally brushed people off with an answer like "it was time" or "songwriting's hard'.

But there's an interview with him in 2018 that sheds a bit more light:

"Certain composers only have so much productivity in them. Mozart wrote more than 40 symphonies, Beethoven wrote 9. That difference doesn’t mean one guy was better than the other. And I always looked at the Beatles as a template. They did 12 studio albums. By the time I got to my 12th album, I didn’t think the quality trajectory was going to continue to go up.”

The final track on Joel’s last collection of new songs, River of Dreams, is called ‘Famous Last Words’. It ends with:

And these are the last words I have to say  / It's always hard to say goodbye  

But now it's time to put this book away  / Then that's the story of my life

I suppose that’s the question for everyone.

What do you want to be your story?

And how many chapters will it take?