Billy Joel, the patron saint of closing baseball parks, closed out the Texas Rangers’ time at Globe Life Park in Arlington (aka “Dallas” which has to make the Arlington city officials insane – never have a city with one pro team is named after a neighboring city and another is named after the State) with a two-hour hits set. He offered the audience a choice of “deep cuts and album tracks” or “hits” early on, and the crowd chose “hits”, which seems predictable.
If you can’t close a park with World Series baseball, Billy Joel is a good second choice.
There are few artists left that can play two hours and all the songs are known by most (if not all) of the audience – and even fewer who are doing all their own work, and not also covering other bands they used to be in (I’m looking at you, Sir Paul.)
Billy Joel is one of my few “just buy the tickets” artists for good reason. It’s a fun show, faithful to the records of my youth, with some surprises thrown in, just to keep people paying attention. There’s an unapologetic New York lens on much of his work, but this set is fairly universal. “They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it’s better than drinking alone” is still the finest one-line summary of divorced guy business travel there ever was.