Billy Joel on "Christmas in Fallujah"

Your last pop album was a pretty big success, so why did you stop?

When you are in the pop music business and you are a rock star, there is always pressure to deliver more product, as they say. "When am I going to get that Billy Joel feeling?" I kind of wanted to get off the damn treadmill, because you are only as good as your next hit. You can have a big hit and then a couple of months go by and "Oh, he's washed up." I always rejected that concept. I finished the album with a song called "Famous Last Words." These are the last word I have to say. I kind of knew I was at the end of a particular point in my life, a particular chapter in that book, and I wanted to put an epilogue on it.

You're still touring. Do you find that fulfilling?

I love to play. That is how I started out, before I was writing and before I was a rock star I was in bands. That is the real kick. It seems like history has gone back to that anyway. People played. Then someone invented the phonograph, then they started making recordings of the performances and that kind of took over. Recording artists became state-of-the-art, instead of just performances. Now with the industry and the deep doo doo it is in now, it has all kind of gone back to the live performance, because you can't replace that. That's where I started, and that is kind of what I enjoy — the synergy between musicians on stages. We haven't toured on our own in awhile. We were on tour with Elton for close to ten years. We were playing a lot of greatest hits stuff. That was fun for a while, but then it became kind of wrote rote and we wanted to see what it was like to tour on our own again and play our own set list of songs and album tracks, obscurities. Can we still do this on our own? And so far, the response has been really good. People still want to see us.

I was looking at the set list from your first '06 show , where you opened with Piano Man, and played Laura, and Zanzibar and Famous Last Words and all these rarities. By the next show you dropped some of those songs. What happened?

Well, we wanted to try something different. We wanted to see how it would work if we did the set backward, if we did a lot of obscurities, and the show was a real stinker. A lot of people went to the bathroom. A lot of people were disappointed. We didn't get the response that we normally get if we balance the show another way. People pay a ton of money for tickets now. We kept our tickets under a hundred bucks, trying not to squeeze out younger people. We want younger people to come to the shows, and they can't afford that much. You have to keep that in mind when you are on stage. They are here to hear stuff they are familiar with, as well as the stuff we want to be self-indulgent with. There is a balance you have to strike, and that is just experience from the road.

Do you think you will just keep touring? Do you see a point where you will just want to stop?

No, I will stop. I am not going to say that it is going to be tomorrow. I don't want to make one of those grand retirement speeches. People thought I said I was going to stop doing it all together, but I never said I was going to stop being a musician. I just said I wasn't going to tour as much. I probably won't be writing a lot of songs in the near future. I probably won't be recording as much. I am 58-years-old and I see pictures of myself and am like "Oh God, you never looked like a rock star, but now you look like a rock star's grandfather." There is a physicality to it. Once you get to a certain age, you just aren't going to be able to do it, grandpa. Although, the Stones seem to be pushing the envelope.