The “gloppy ballad” Billy Joel refused to play live and the curse it holds
Billy Joel famously curates a crowd-pleasing setlist, a collection of hits guaranteed for a great experience of singing and dancing to a medley of his biggest hits. And yes, that includes classics like ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, ‘Piano Man’, and even ‘Uptown Girl’.
Safe to say, if you’re looking for a good time, one without too much pretence and a whole lot of fun, then Joel is your man. Not ravaged by the necessity to be seen as cool or artistic, Joel just delivers tunes for his audience. All except one.
In truth, Joel has enjoyed playing these hits live for almost all of his career. Performing for audiences has always been his lifeblood: in fact, Joel’s entry into the music industry was not fueled by a desire to merely impact a select few. Instead, his motivation was rooted in the aspiration to provide entertainment for the people.
Despite this, there exists one song among Joel’s vast discography that was absent from his shows for the longest time. It wasn’t because he hated the track or because it was difficult to play live in a logistical sense, but it simply hit too close to home. ‘Just The Way You Are’ is a song on Joel’s fifth studio album, The Stranger, released as the album’s lead single. The song garnered more than substantial recognition – it was Joel’s first song to hit the US top ten and UK top 20 and earned the singer two Grammy Awards for ‘Record of the Year’ and ‘Song of the Year’.
According to Joel, the melody and chord progression initially came to him in a dream, which became coupled with its title and chorus after Joel drew inspiration from the Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons song ‘Rag Doll’. He told USA Today about the song: “I dreamt the melody, not the words. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and going, ‘This is a great idea for a song.’ A couple of weeks later, I’m in a business meeting, and the dream reoccurs to me right at that moment because my mind had drifted off from hearing numbers and legal jargon. And I said, ‘I have to go!’ I got home and I ended up writing it all in one sitting, pretty much. It took me maybe two or three hours to write the lyrics.”
The track, which he wrote about his first wife and former business manager, Elizabeth Weber, didn’t receive immediate favour from Joel himself or his band. Initially, Joel opted to omit the track from his album. However, the persistent urging of Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow, who were recording in adjacent studios, persuaded him to incorporate the song into the final mix.
However, the album’s producer, Phil Ramone, contested Joel’s initial decision to leave it out. In an interview, Ramone asserted that excluding the song wasn’t financially viable, given the limited material Joel had for the record. That wasn’t the only turmoil the singer faced in relation to the song, however, as it lost much of its lustre after Joel and Weber divorced in 1982. From then until the mid-2000s, Joel rarely performed the song, admitting his reluctance was due to the emotions it stirred about his divorce.
Occasionally, his drummer would joke about the situation, changing the song’s lyrics to: “She got the house. She got the car”. Joel also reflected on the way that such love ballads tempt fate in his personal life, stating that doing so is often a sure way to get rid of the people you love: “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.”
The song almost never made it onto the LP and was nearly cut. In 2006, on Australian TV, Joel confirmed, “We almost didn’t put it on an album. We were sitting around listening to it going naaah, that’s a chick song.” He later labelled the track a “gloppy ballad” that would only be played at weddings. In fairness, he wasn’t that wrong.
The singer’s catalogue isn’t all inspired by those deeply heartbreaking relationships, however. A lot of them actually dance around the opposite, like ‘Uptown Girl’, which bashfully tackles the notion of having multiple, shallow liaisons with women. And he’s since gotten over his opinion of ‘Just The Way You Are’ because it’s almost always a part of his setlists these days, much to the joy of die-hard fans.
