A bad guy will try to blow up a Billy Joel concert on this week’s episode of Arrow, the CW’s DC Comics show about billionaire playboy turned masked vigilante Oliver Queen. “For the Thanksgiving episode of Arrow, we wanted Cayden James (Michael Emerson) to threaten a major event at Star City,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim tells Entertainment Weekly. “A variety of ideas were discussed, but when we settled on a rock concert, I knew it had to be Billy Joel.”
EW reports that actual footage of a Billy Joel concert will appear during the episode. “Having grown up on Long Island — where, as it happens, this episode’s concert footage was taken from — I’ve been a fan of Billy and his music since I was 7 years old,” Guggenheim explains. “He’s always been an inspiration to me, personally and artistically. I told him as much when I wrote to him to ask for his permission to use his concert footage in our episode and when he agreed, it was one of the happiest days of my career. I chose ‘No Man’s Land’ for the episode because I wanted to use an album track and I’ve always liked how that particular song sounds live.”
No word yet if Joel’s performance in Arrow’s Star City will be a one-time thing or a monthly residency or what.
This article originally appeared in Stereogum.
