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Billy Joel announced serious health problem last year. There's a major update

Madeleine Marr, Miami Herald on

Published in Entertainment News

MIAMI — It’s a Christmas miracle!

Just under a month after Billy Joel declared he was no longer able to perform due to health concerns, he’s headed back to the spotlight. Sort of.

Since Joel is no longer in a New York state of mind but a Florida one, he plans to do a show close to home, at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, near where he bought a waterfront mansion in 2024.

The school’s Instagram post says that the NYC-born superstar will headline “An Evening of Questions & Answers…And a Little Music” on Dec. 14. The presentation is, alas, not for the general public, but exclusively for “currently enrolled” FAU students. (Tell them to send you a selfie.)

The highly anticipated event will hopefully help Joel get his sea legs back after a challenging time that saw him having to put his extensive motorcycle collection up for auction because he can no longer drive.

Fans began to take notice something was amiss with Joel around February 2025 when he fell while singing “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.

 

Three months later, the “Uptown Girl” singer canceled all upcoming concerts, telling followers he’d been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus, an abnormal buildup of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. The debilitating yet common condition can cause memory, vision, hearing and balance problems.

In September, Joel gave some heartening news on his eponymous SiriusXM channel, revealing he’d been steadily improving thanks to a procedure to implant a shunt to drain the fluid in his brain.

Caveat? Performing, his passion, was risky.

“The doctors told me this: because of my job, which is playing rock and roll music very loud, that it was giving me something like a concussion every time I did a show,” the legend explained. “It was causing damage to my brain nerves and I could be losing more brain cells the more I played, the more shows I did.”

Translation: Anyone who’s lucky enough to attend the FAU event, don’t expect the Grammy winner to jump around the stage at Carole & Barry Kaye Performing Arts Auditorium like he used to back in the day. And we are so totally fine with that.


©2026 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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