Billy Joel reveals how Linda Ronstadt gave him his first hit record: “Are you out of your mind?”
Billy Joel has given Linda Ronstadt credit for his track ‘Just The Way You Are’ becoming his first monster hit.
Before then, Joel had enjoyed reasonable success, but ‘Just The Way You Are’ completely altered the trajectory of his career, bringing his fourth album The Stranger to the chart, and helping him become a star.
“The first really big hit that I had was a song called ‘Just The Way You Are’, which was a ballad,” Joel explained in a new interview with Rick Beato, before delivering a brief rendition of the classic track on his home piano.
Reflecting on the creation, Joel, who described it as “a nice soft ballad, a love song,” admitted, “I didn’t even want to put it on the album because I thought it was too mushy.”
However, thankfully, he had some friends on hand to put him in his place, adding, “And then we were in the studio, I thought it was too soft, too mushy, Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow were in the studio, and we played the song for them.”
Joel recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t like this song that much.’ Linda Ronstadt goes, ‘Are you out of your mind? That’s a hit record. You got to put that on the album. That’s a great song.’ ‘Really?’ She talked me into it. So I have to thank Linda Ronstadt for that song.”
Thankfully, Joel did take Ronstadt’s advice on board, which became one of his signature tracks, winning him two Grammys, as well as mass adulation.
It’s one of the few songs that Paul McCartney wishes he wrote, which is a huge compliment for Joel, who told Beato, “That blew me away. He’s like the melodic king. He can do no wrong with melody, Paul. He’s got a showtunes background, his dad was in a show band, I think, a theatre band, and Paul’s got a lot of that, but his melodic sense is incredible.”
While speaking about The Beatles to Beato, Joel said of John Lennon, “John liked macabre lyrics; he didn’t like all those granny tunes. He wrote words to screw people’s minds up; it didn’t have to make sense. It was about the sound of the words, and a lot of time a lot of the lyric writing has to do with the sound of the word.”
Joel then used ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which he admitted is “not a very good song musically”, as an example of the tool, adding, “Lyrically, it was fun to say,” before reeling off the classic lyrics.
Elsewhere, in the new interview, Joel opened up about his decision to quit writing albums in 1993 in order to protect his legacy, sharing, “When I got to the end of writing River of Dreams, I felt like I was done. I was thinking about what I was going to do next, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to sit down and write a whole album’s worth of songs’, I didn’t want to do it.”
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