“I’m sick of it”: The song Billy Joel retired from playing live
It must get exhausting having a hit. Imagine being asked to repeat something on a never-ending loop, year on year, city on city, tour on tour. No amount of new music seems to ever undo the draw of the big song. There appears to be no antidote to it – unless you make a clean break, like Billy Joel did.
He’d had enough. By 1990, Joel couldn’t stomach singing the same songs from the 1970s over again. He was decades out and a long list of albums away from early hits on offerings like The Stranger or Turnstiles, so when he hit the road again, he decided to leave them at home.
But obviously, you can’t build a full tour set without the hits, so the decision was made to merely streamline them. For a musician who has penned so many timelessly beloved tunes, that’s a tough call and one that was bound to leave some fans unhappy. Everyone wants to hear their favourite songs, sure. However, Joel made the decision in 1990 that his tours would not feel like a constant loop of greatest hits shows where people went to the toilet during the occasional new track. And so, things had to be axed.
One obvious omission was ‘Just The Way You Are’, a 1977 song that he was tired of. “I’m just sick of it,” he told Rolling Stone so plainly. It was a song that, by then, had lost all real meaning or emotion to him.
“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. He was so bored and distracted that he lost the words and ended up stumbling, looking for help from his bandmates.
“So I’m looking at Liberty, who sings the words all the time to help me pick it up. And I’m following his lips, and he’s singing to me, ‘She got the house, the dog, the car,’ and that’s what I sang,” Joel added as a glimmer of his divorce found its way into the song as a stark moment – “I realized I shouldn’t be doing this song.”
So he didn’t, though he said that the decision might not be forever, adding, “Maybe it will come back sometime, but I’m not ready to do it again.”
For the next tour, the song was nowhere to be found. Instead, he still played some hits, but only the ones that he still wanted to sing or still felt a connection to. “I realized it’s a gyp for me to do a song just because people expect it. It’s pandering,” he said. It’s also not the best way to get the best performance.
The singer has to feel it, he said, “I’ve got to have a vested interest in doing a song, for crying out loud.”
