Thursday, October 1, 2026
Long Island’s place in American culture is inseparable from Billy Joel’s music. The Hicksville-born artist has taken listeners through stories of love, loss and life in the modern world, earning 5 Grammy awards and a spot in The Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame.
LIMEHOF has planned a special event to celebrate and analyze Joel’s career, bringing together industry experts and people who helped shape the Piano Man’s story and success.
The Billy Joel Symposium will be held on June 6 and 7 at the LIMEHOF location at 97 Main Street in Stony Brook. The two-day conference will explore Joel’s performance, lyrics and cultural impact, featuring presentations of 23 analytical papers, panels and audience Q&A opportunities.
Among the featured keynote speakers are Jon Small, an acclaimed musician, director and producer who has worked on various projects with Joel; Jason Hanley, vice president of education and visitor engagement at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum; and music journalist Wayne Robins, best known for his work in Rolling Stone, Newsday and novels. Robins has worked extensively with Joel for decades, reviewing and thoughtfully critiquing the artist’s work and building a personal friendship.
“My notion of being a music critic was to judge each performance on its own, within the context of the person’s entire body of work,” Robins said.
Robins remembers a formative conversation with Joel regarding his performance in Carnegie Hall in 1976.
“It was Billy Joel on a roller coaster. There were ups and downs and see, like a roller coaster, the highs were really high, and the lows were very steep,” he explained. “Six months later, I was doing a phone interview with him… he remembered the words of from my unflattering review of his band that summer. I said, oh, okay, so we need to have a talk.
“What we talked about was that I would be covering him for a long time, and we had to work together that I was neither for nor against anything he did, but that I promised to be fair,” he continued. “We had no more problems after that.”
Rockville Centre resident Clive Young, an adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s University and co-editor of Mix Magazine, is the writer of “Billy Joel and the Death of Analogue Recording.”
“I have been doing a Billy Joel program around Long Island for the past three, four years about all the different places that were important to his music and where he grew up,” he said. “The opportunity to approach music you’re almost too familiar with and hear it with new ears because they’re exploring it from an intellectual point of view… is a fascinating opportunity.”
Nora Cronin of East Meadow, an adjunct professor at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, offers a historical perspective of Joel’s work in her essay “The Outsiders: The Long Island Youth of ‘Captain Jack,’” which explores the historical context that inspired one of Joel’s biggest hits through her investigative research.
“If you grew up in Long Island, you’re born with the entire Billy Joel catalog imprinted onto your brain, and I’m certainly no exception,” she said. “I set up my lectures exactly like the way I would be talking to a friend at a bar about music or about crime reporting during the time period of the late ’60s and early ’70s … It was a time of a change of social movements and cultural shifts.”
LIMEHOF, founded in 2004, is a nonprofit dedicated to Long Island’s musical and entertainment heritage. In 2022, the organization opened their first Hall of Fame building location in Stony Brook and inducted more than 130 musicians and music industry executives. They also offer education programs, scholarships, and awards to Long Island students and educators.
Tom Needham, the vice chairman of LIMEHOF, played a major role in making the symposium a reality.
“(For) people who have a real affinity for a certain type of music, they want to be around other people who do,” he said. “That’s one of the great things about LIMEHOF. It’s a place to recognize all of the incredible talents who have either gotten their start here on Long Island or who moved to Long Island at some point and made music.”
The spotlight will be shared on the first day of the symposium; Dennis Arfa, Billy Joel’s agent for over 50 years, will be inducted into LIMEHOF at 7 p.m. on June 6. Arfa has guided Joel’s touring career through is position as the Chairman of the Music Division for Independent Artist Group, also working with Metallica, Rod Stewart, Rush, Limp Bizkit and many other famous musicians.
The ‘Billy Joel Symposium’ is open to the public with special ticket purchase. Tickets are available on the LIMEHOF website: LongIslandMusicAndEntertainmentHallOfFame1.thundertix.com/events/261552
