Some of this has to do with the venue. After all, The Garden is fitted atop Penn Station—the busiest transportation hub in the entire Western Hemisphere—with subways and bus routes and seven different tunnels that fling Joel’s faithful base out to Hackensack on New Jersey Transit and Oyster Bay on the Long Island Railroad. But Joel’s dominance doesn’t end at the terminus of the Hudson River Line. The MSG residency, with help from a methodical regimen of packed stadium shows across the United States and beyond, has turned Joel, who was all but retired just a few years ago, into the music industry’s fourth-highest paid performer in 2014 and 2015 (the most recent years for which data is available). Another way of putting it: Despite having not released a new pop album since 1993, Billy Joel is outearning the likes of U2 and Adele.

These successes undoubtedly must irk his many critics, who have over the years derided Joel in extremely personal terms: as a would-be “Irving Berlin of narcissistic alienation” (1973), “the worst pop singer ever” (2009), and more recently, “the great American nightmare” (2017). While Joel has scored twice as many Top 40 hits as his friend and fellow tri-state institution Bruce Springsteen, he’s received comparatively little of The Boss’s critical acclaim. Springsteen, for example, has been awarded 20 non-honorary Grammys compared with Joel’s five. Joel’s work, steadily dismissed as middlebrow and ersatz pastiche, hardly seemed destined for a decades-long afterlife. So how is Billy Joel pulling this off?

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In 1998, in the era before big data, a brand researcher describing the effect of nostalgia on the palate brought up the orange juice test in an interview with The New York Times. “If you do blind taste tests in New York,” he explained, “Tropicana will win every time. If you do it in California, Minute Maid wins every time.” The reasoning was simple: “That’s the taste you grew up with.”

While I didn’t grow up in an orange juice household, like millions of Americans born in the 1980s, my required intake of concentrated saccharine did involve the music of Billy Joel.

His 1980 album Glass Houses, Joel’s melodic incursion into the punk-rock era (“You May Be Right,” “It’s Still Rock ‘N Roll to Me”) was in semi-constant rotation in my dad’s car. My older sister and I spent hours faithfully recreating the excessive shoulder-shimmying from Joel’s staggering string of hit music videos from his 1983 doo-wop-themed An Innocent Man (“Tell Her About It,” “Uptown Girl,” “An Innocent Man,” “Keeping the Faith”). And my first true live concert—with my parents in tow, no doubt—was Joel’s stop at The Summit in Houston in support of his middling 1989 album Storm Front (“We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “I Go to Extremes”).

If there were one standout in our household, it was probably Joel’s 1978 jazz-themed album 52nd Street, which, in addition to being one of his few critically acclaimed records, is one of his strangest. The album kicks off with “Big Shot,” the petulant first of three straight massive singles, before zigging into the schmaltzy “Honesty,” and then zagging back to the defiant “My Life.” But for my piggy bank, the pathos-filled second half is where the truffles are. “Zanzibar,” the story of a drunk in a sports bar, has two jazz-trumpet solos. “Rosalinda’s Eyes,” Joel’s tribute to his mother, features vibes, marimba, and a 21-second recorder interlude. The album’s pièce de résistance is the Righteous Brothers-inspired “Until the Night,” whose first five schlocky minutes are eclipsed by the song’s sax-besotted, 90-second coda. (Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers accepted Joel’s compliment by recording a cover of “Until the Night” in 1980, one year after Czech chanteuse Helena Vondráčková did a note-for-note homage in German.)