Long Island troubadour Billy Joel revealed Tuesday that he underwent brain surgery because he didn’t want to lose his “marbles.”
Speaking on his SiriusXM channel, the 77-year-old “Piano Man” singer admitted he initially balked at going under the knife for hydrocephalus, a disorder he was diagnosed with in 2025.
“I said, ‘Well, what does that entail?’” he said he asked the doctor.
After being told that it involved having a surgeon “drill a hole through your skull” and “stick a shunt inside your brain,” Joel said “I didn’t want to do that.”
“But then I read up on it, and I realized it can help improve your balance and can help your memory,” he said. “You know, I don’t want to lose my marbles. It’s hard to tell what’s age and what’s a condition, so I agreed to do the shunt, and I had surgery, and they implanted a shunt in my brain, and it actually improved things.”
Joel did not say exactly when he had the surgery. But he was diagnosed in May 2025 with normal pressure hydrocephalus, which is a condition in which cerebrospinal fluid builds up inside the skull and presses on the brain, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The condition is often treatable and sometimes reversible.
“They used to call it water on the brain,” Joel said on his radio show.
Joel said he went to see the neurologist because he was feeling unsteady.
“I noticed that my balance was not good,” he said. “I had this sense of being on a boat, like this rocking motion. I wasn’t steady on my feet.”
Will he be returning to the stage anytime soon? Joel didn’t say on his show, and his longtime publicist did not immediately respond to an email seeking an answer to that question.
“The doctors told me this: Because of my job, which is playing rock ’n’ roll music very loud, that it was giving me something like a concussion every time I did a show,” he said.
Pounding out songs on the piano, he said, “was causing damage to my brain nerves, and I could be losing more brain cells the more shows I did. I realized that means I shouldn’t be doing this right now. I got to improve.”
So Joel said he’s been going to physical therapy and following his doctors’ advice.
“I’m doing whatever it is they tell me to do because I don’t want to lose it, you know?” he said.
And he expects to make a full recovery.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m here. I’m still here.”
