A long time friend and collaborator of Billy Joel has said the 76-year-old singer songwriter is “doing very very well” after his diagnosis with a rare brain disorder and that “all arrows point to him making a full recovery.”
It comes just four months after Joel cancelled all future live performances after he was diagnosed with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH). This is a condition that is caused by excess fluid building up in the brain’s ventricles. This in turn creates greater pressure, which compresses brain tissue, leading to issues with hearing, vision and balance that are often mistaken for dementia.
Now Steve Cohen, Joel’s longtime creative director for his live shows has given an interview with The Ankler about his friend. “The headline is, he’s great,” Cohen, who was first hired by Joel over 50 years ago, said.
“He’s doing very, very well. But he was diagnosed with something that is often misdiagnosed, so there was a lot of time where it was a mystery of what was going on. He was ploughing through these shows and didn't feel well while doing them.
"After a series of tests and connecting the dots, it was shocking. But at the same time, it answered a lot of questions.”
“I literally had lunch with him two days ago in Florida,” Cohen revealed. “We sat for three hours. He’s doing what he needs to do to recover because he really needs time away from the taxing work of traveling, performing and all that stuff. So while he’s in great spirits, he’s not predicting anything in the future. He is just taking it one day at a time.”
“Knowing the way he’s built, all arrows point to him making full recovery. Whether we see him sit behind a piano in front of 18,000 people again, that’s up to him. I look at this as a temporary pause, because I look at all of the times that we don’t work as a temporary pause, but who knows?”
Among the shows Joel had to cancel earlier this year were UK dates at Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium and Murrayfield in Edinburgh. Whether these will ever be rescheduled remains to be seen, but fans now have more reason to be hopeful, at least.
