It’s cloudy this morning over Billy Joel’s house on the eastern end of Long Island, but conditions are ideal for his commute to work.

The 59-year-old rock legend has been playing a special series of 10 concerts at the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Conn., about 30 miles north—and he’s been making the trip by sailing his commuter boat across the Block Island Sound between New York and Connecticut. “It’s pretty convenient unless we’ve got a gale or a hurricane,” he notes with a chuckle. “It’s the best way to go to work I can think of.”

Joel’s run of Connecticut shows is a record-breaking engagement that will see him play to more than 100,000 fans. But the Mohegan Sun is really just the batter’s box in which Joel is warming up for the main event: On July 16 and 18 he will play the final two concerts at New York City’s Shea Stadium before the hallowed venue is dismantled. “I’m aware that the first big concert at the stadium was done by the Beatles,” he says. “The Beatles. That’s very humbling, to play where history was made.”

But who better to see off a New York institution than Billy Joel? Raised in Hicksville, N.Y., 75 miles east of his current residence, Joel’s life and art have always been shaped by these environs. It was here that the son of a German father and English mother first took piano lessons as a boy, and where he discovered rock ’n’ roll as a Beatles-obsessed high schooler. He recorded his first solo album, 1971’s Cold Spring Harbor, in nearby Hempstead and named it for a hamlet near Hicksville. “Anybody who grows up in New York knows you can never really shake it,” he says.

It was Joel’s second album, 1973’s Piano Man, that gave him his first taste of national success. The title track was a semiautobiographical account of six months spent playing in a Los Angeles piano bar (“I was hiding out from a bad deal I made,” he explains) that gave Joel his first Top 40 hit, his signature song and his nickname—tell someone you’re off to see “The Piano Man,” and they’ll know who you mean.

That’s because Joel spent the next two decades building one of pop music’s best-loved and most diverse bodies of work. His 33 Top 40 hits include closely observed character studies (“Movin’ Out [Anthony’s Song]”), genre pastiches (“Tell Her About It,” “Uptown Girl”), social observations (“Allentown,” “We Didn’t Start the Fire”) and statements of purpose (“My Life”). Often pigeonholed as a balladeer, he actually scored most often with rockers like “Only the Good Die Young,” “I Go to Extremes” and “Pressure.” His biggest hit remains 1980’s passionate defense of both the music he loved and the change that he saw as necessary for its survival: “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.”

After 1993’s River of Dreams, Joel decided the time was right to walk away from his pop career. He had become more interested in classical forms, and no longer felt driven to share his thoughts and feelings with a mass audience through his typically revealing lyrics.

In 2001 came Fantasies & Delusions, an album of his classical compositions performed by pianist Richard Joo. Joel’s self-penned pop output has been limited to two songs released last year: “All My Life,” written as a second-anniversary gift to his third wife; and “Christmas in Fallujah,” performed by young singer Cass Dillon. (There was also the 2002 Broadway musical built around his music, Movin’ Out, for which he won a Tony award.)

In the absence of new music, the press turned to examining his private life. Media judgment was duly passed on Joel’s 2004 marriage to TV personality Katie Lee, 32 years his junior, as well as a pair of stints in treatment for alcoholism and several (non-alcohol-related) car crashes. He shrugs off the media interest. “I don’t get it as bad as a lot of others,” he figures. “Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, but they don’t go after me as relentlessly as they do other people who are more glamorous.”

The void created by the lack of new music has also been filled by archival projects like a 2005 box set of rare and unreleased material, My Lives. “I call it Stems and Seeds,” he cracks. “It was stuff that was never supposed to have been heard. All these compilations—Greatest Hits, The Essential, The Really and Truly Very Best of, Honestly, We Really Mean It This Time—[my record label] Sony’s putting it out, not me. I wouldn’t put any of that stuff out. To be fair, I haven’t given them anything. That’s what they’ve got to do to sell records.” Joel’s dismissive attitude toward idle nostalgia extends to the new expanded reissue of his biggest-selling album, 1977’s The Stranger. “It’s their idea, not mine,” he says. “I already did The Stranger.”

Nonetheless, the package is a treasure trove for fans: a lovingly remastered version of the original album, a vibrant live disc recorded at Carnegie Hall during the same period and a DVD featuring interviews with Joel, producer Phil Ramone and others involved in the album’s creation. As Joel relaxed at home between trips across Block Island Sound, he gamely looked back at The Stranger, forward to Shea Stadium and beyond.

On a personal level, what does it mean to you to close out Shea Stadium?
I remember when Shea Stadium was built. I was a kid, and this modern stadium went up for a new ball team for New York, the Mets. It defined the beginning of an era. Now the thing that was considered a state-of-the-art stadium is being demolished in my lifetime. I have mixed feelings about that. But I’m happy to mark the occasion, to celebrate the history of it.

Has being a native New Yorker shaped your body of work?
Absolutely. I was living in New York when I became a solo artist. [After several years in L.A.] I moved back to New York in the early ’70s and started writing songs about where I was. I realized I had recaptured my own identity when I moved home. You never know what you’ve got until you leave it, which is what “New York State of Mind” [1976] is all about.

For more, get the latest Issue of Performing Songwriter, ISSUE No. 111