How did ‘Just The Way You Are’ put a curse on Billy Joel?
There are plenty of things people get superstitious about: walking over cracks, three drains in a row, broken mirrors, and black cats. They rarely have a reason; instead, they’re just loose worries passed down from generation to generation. But for Billy Joel, after a sad pattern emerged, his own superstitions and fears felt like they were cutting his hand off.
What is a piano man without a love song? Surely a love song is a core part of any artist, a true foundational cornerstone of the music world as its tough to find a single musician from any genre that doesn’t touch on feels of love, longing, lust, or even heartbreak at least once. The love song is the origin of everything as arguably every single emotion humans could feel or think to write about derives from it in some way, even anger or bitterness.
Especially for a musician like Joel, whose music revolves around the tradition of the piano ballad, merging that with more of a rock and roll edge, a love song was always going to be important. And he has some great ones, whether they be written for an actual lover or even a scene, a city, even himself as ‘Vienna’ certainly feels like a love letter written to himself, reminding him to take it easier on himself.
But when it came to his most outright love song, things soured. ‘Just The Way You Are’ is a prime example of a truly adoring track as he sings “I said I love you, that’s forever / And this I promise from the heart, mmm / I couldn’t love you any better / I love you just the way you are, right.” Written for his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, it’s the kind of song people dream about having written about them.
Billy Joel’s curse and the pain hehind ‘Just The Way You Are’
However, after the song was released in 1977, it was only five years until the pair divorced in 1982. It felt like the song came out, and instantly, the love was on the rocks. “Every time I wrote a song for a person I was in a relationship with, it didn’t last,” Joel said, “It was kind of like the curse. Here’s your song, we might as well say goodbye now.”
It was so painful for him that he ended up retiring the song despite it being one of his biggest hits. “There was one time when I was going through the divorce from my first wife, and I drifted away while singing it. I was so bored I started thinking, ‘Well, I’ll get back to the hotel about midnight, and they have prime rib on the room-service menu,’” he said of a time when he had to disassociate so hard to get through the song that he actually ended up fumbling the lyrics. That’s when he knew he had to let that one go.
But the pattern seemed to prevail. ‘Just The Way You Are’ and the failure of that first marriage was the initial spark though, as if that song and the fate of the relationship sealed in a kind of curse that plagued his career, leading to him writing less and less love songs in the hopes of protecting his real life love affairs.
