Nearing the end of the downtown Phoenix concert on his co-headlining tour with Stevie Nicks at Chase Field on Friday, Dec. 8, Billy Joel paused to reflect on the apparent incompatibility this tour may represent to certain fans on both sides of the aisle.
Even Joel didn’t get it at first. Or so he led us to believe.
“I couldn’t understand the package, as they say,” he recalled after thanking his costar for doing the tour. “OK, Stevie Nicks. And Billy Joel. OK. Why?”
That got a great reaction. Lots of laughter. Then he answered his own question with a shout of “Because it sells tickets, for Christ’s sake.”
This is true. It does sell tickets.
Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks: The soundtrack of your life
But it also makes a lot of sense on levels that go well beyond the ticket-buying super-power that Venn diagram suggests.
They both had massive pop hits in the ‘70s and ‘80s, so regardless of which artist is the bigger draw for you and yours, the other one will also play a lot of songs that occupy a sweet spot on the soundtrack of your life.
You know what came out the same year as Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”? Billy Joel’s “The Stranger.” Think about it. Two career-defining albums all but guaranteed to satisfy the same nostalgic urges.
And Joel and Nicks both know how to work a room, packing a setlist with crowd-pleasing classics while establishing a conversational rapport that draws you even deeper into who they are and what they represent.
Is Nicks a bit more heartfelt? Sure she is. Is Joel a bigger goof? Of course he is.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
And there was no mistaking the camaraderie between them when Joel made an early appearance during Nicks' set to sing Tom Petty's part on "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around,” doing his best to channel Petty in both phrasing and inflection, then hugging it out with Nicks before he left the stage.
It was an easy highlight of the night.
Stevie Nicks setlist 2023:Every song she sang in Phoenix on her tour with Billy Joel
Stevie Nicks was in excellent voice throughout her 90-minute set
Although this is a co-headlining proposition, someone had to go on first, and that task fell to Nicks, who more than rose to the occasion at the helm of a fantastic backing band with longtime musical director Waddy Wachtel often dominating the proceedings on guitar, from “Fall From Grace” to the cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worh” and “Edge of Seventeen.”
His slide work, in particular, was consistently brilliant.
And Nicks was in excellent voice throughout her roughly 90-minute set while rocking an impressive assortment of shawls. That voice has deepened through the years, but Nicks is enough of an artist that she’s learned how to harness the power of the voice she has in 2023 and apply it in intriguing ways to classics she recorded in her 20s.
I’ll admit, I wasn’t wild about her messing with the melody to “Dreams” when she first started reimagining those early songs to suit her changing vocal range, but the “Dreams” we heard in Phoenix felt like the way it should be sung. At least in 2023.
It was a powerful performance, rocking with conviction in all the right places.
Because Nicks' image tends to leave a lot of writers searching for more synonyms for haunting and mysterious, we rarely hear about how much a song like “Gold Dust Woman” rocks in the hands of her latest collection of backing musicians.
But in Phoenix, “Gold Dust Woman” was an epic 12-minute rendition that used the Fleetwood Mac recording as a starting point and went off on a far more psychedelic journey that built to a fiery climax that was both majestic and intense. It was a highlight of her 15-song Phoenix setlist.
When Stevie went solo:How Stevie Nicks fueled her solo career with 'Stop Draggin' My Heart Around'
Stevie Nicks honored the memory of her mother, Tom Petty and Christine McVie
She took the stage to a recording of Tom Petty doing “Runnin’ Down a Dream” and set the tone for her performance with a dramatic rendition of “Outside the Rain,” which segued seamlessly into “Dreams,” the hit she took to No. 1 with Fleetwood Mac.
That was the first of several Fleetwood Mac songs in a set that found her signing off with two selections she wrote for the self-titled Fleetwood Mac album that introduced the “Rumours” lineup, “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” the latter of which was accompanied by vintage photographs of Nicks and the late Christine McVie.
She also made her way through countless highlights of her solo years, from the pulsing synth and slide guitar of a “Stand Back” that appeared to have a harder edge than the recording, to the a cappella break of “If Anyone Falls.”
And the heartfelt nod to her friendship with Petty, whose image flashed across the screen as she sang “Free Fallin’,” was exactly as sweet as she meant it to be.
It was after “Dreams” that Nicks reminded everyone that she was born in Phoenix.
“As soon as I get here, I think I’m gonna miss the ocean,’” she said. “And I get here and I don’t miss the ocean.”
As Nicks was preparing to finish her encore with “Landslide,” a bittersweet highlight of that first release with Fleetwood Mac, she dedicated the song to her brother, Christopher, with whom she shared a home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, for 25 years.
It’s as emotional a song as you could ever hope to hear. And after bringing her performance to a vulnerable finish with that undisputed classic, she talked about having met McVie in 1975.
“It’s kind of an empty world without her,” she said.
Then she teared up while recalling the words of her mother, Barbara Nicks, who died in 2012.
“And I want you to also know that my mom always used to say to me, ‘When you are hurt, you run to the stage.’ And I run to the stage every night.”
It may have been the strongest solo set I’ve ever seen her play.
Stevie Nicks was a tough act to follow. But Billy Joel managed
By any reasonable metric, Stevie Nicks was a tough act to follow. But Billy Joel is well-equipped to rise to such occasions.
His 23-song setlist was loaded with classics, from “My Life” (the opening song) to “Pressure,” “An Innocent Man,” “The Longest Time,” “Don’t Ask Me Why,” “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “Allentown,” “The River of Dreams” and “Piano Man,” the Dylan-esque breakthrough that turned into a massive a cappella singalong to bring his main set to a spirited conclusion.
Those are all Top 20 entries on the Billboard Hot 100. And he played them all in the course of a crowd-pleasing set he followed with an encore packed with even more hits (“We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “Uptown Girl,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,” “Big Shot” and “You May Be Right”).
Can you imagine?
He also played several classics we just think are massive hits because that’s just how much he came to dominate the culture in his prime.
'He was ready to headline':Billy Joel fans remember his 1st Phoenix concerts
Is Billy Joel aging like a fine bottle of red? Or is it a bottle of white?
Joel hasn’t even made a new pop record since “River of Dreams” in 1993.
No need to check your abacus. That’s 30 years.
But in a way, that only makes it that much easier to satisfy his audience. He isn’t pimping out some mediocre shadow of the man he used to be. And he’s perfectly comfortable playing the hits (as well as songs his true fans have convinced themselves are hits, from “New York State of Mind” to “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”).
He joked about his voice not being up to the challenge of those high notes on the doo-wop flavored songs on “An Innocent Man.” But truthfully, the high notes sounded better than the low ones on the title track to that one.
Even when he obviously couldn’t do the things his voice could do when he was only half as old as he is now, he pulled it off with a blend of professionalism, charm and natural ability.
His piano playing was frequently stunning, from “New York State of Mind” to “Only the Good Die Young” and “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.”
His backing band occasionally stole the show, from saxophonist Mark Rivera on countless songs to Crystal Taliefero, who commanded the state with soul on Ike & Tina Turner’s “River Deep – Mountain High” (interspersed with “The River of Dreams”) and guitarist Mike DelGuidice, who thrilled the audience with his opera singing on Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” and his channeling Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.”
Longtime horn player Chris Fischer also made the most of his time in the spotlight on the flugelhorn and trumpet solos in “Zanzibar.”
Billy Joel told fans, 'It's been a while. I lost my hair'
That should have been enough to please the audience, but Joel remains a natural entertainer who meets the challenges of each new chapter of his own life by adapting to those changes with a winning blend of perseverance, self-effacing humor and playful everyman charisma.
Early in the set, he joked about the lack of hair beneath his baseball cap.
“Good to be back,” he said. “It’s been a while. I lost my hair.”
The baseball cap and blazer combo, as it turns out, is a look that suits his sense of showmanship, a casual hipster nonchalance as filtered through a streetwise New York attitude, a goofy sense of humor and an unabashed eagerness to please.
Before the 23-song set was through, he dusted off a loose, impromptu “Sleigh Ride,” surprising the members of his backing band, after asking them, “You wanna do a Christmas song?”
It was sloppy as hell, in the best way possible, suggesting that it might be fun to see him push that envelope a little further off the table. He could definitely pull it off. He’s got the chops and the charisma and the backing band to make it happen.
In the meantime, he’s as entertaining as he’s ever been, as evidenced by his ridiculous Mick Jagger moves on “Start Me Up.” There is a chance those aren’t the moves Maroon 5 had in mind when they were writing “Moves Like Jagger.” But I’d definitely like them better if those were the moves they had in mind. It was hilarious and spot-on.
It could be argued that the man was born to entertain. But having seen him countless times, I’d argue that he’s found new ways to entertain as things that made him entertaining in his youth have given way to things that work in 2023.
It’s a true entertainer that knows how to adapt as time goes on. And Joel is a true entertainer, but without the cynicism of "The Entertainer."
Billy Joel Stevie Nicks setlist 2023: Every song they played in Phoenix
Here's every song the co-headliners played in downtown Phoenix.
Stevie Nicks
- "Outside the Rain"
- "Dreams"(Fleetwood Mac song)
- "If Anyone Falls"
- "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" (with Billy Joel)
- "Fall From Grace”
- “Gypsy” (Fleetwood Mac song)
- "For What It's Worth" (Buffalo Springfield cover)
- "Stand Back”
- "Wild Heart"
- "Bella Donna"
- "Gold Dust Woman" (Fleetwood Mac song)
- "Free Fallin'"(Tom Petty cover)
- “Edge of Seventeen”
Encore
- "Rhiannon"(Fleetwood Mac song)
- "Landslide" (Fleetwood Mac song)
Billy Joel
- "My Life"
- "Pressure"
- "Vienna"
- "Sleigh Ride" (impromptu Christmas instrumental)
- "Zanzibar"
- "Start Me Up" (The Rolling Stones cover)
- "An Innocent Man"
- "The Longest Time" (with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" warmup)
- "Don't Ask Me Why"
- "New York State of Mind"
- "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)"
- "Allentown"
- "Sometimes a Fantasy"
- "Only the Good Die Young"
- "The River of Dreams" (with "River Deep — Mountain High" interlude)
- "Nessun dorma"(Giacomo Puccini cover)
- "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant"
- "Piano Man"
Encore
- "We Didn't Start the Fire"
- "Uptown Girl"
- "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me"
- "Big Shot"
- "You May Be Right"
Reach the reporter ated.masley@arizonarepublic.comor 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter@EdMasley.
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