(Credits: Far Out / Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times / UCLA / Columbia Records)
Sat 14 February 2026 22:00, UK
While an artist can often be their own worst critic, sometimes all it takes is a healthy dose of advice from another musician to persuade them to do things differently.
Billy Joel was on a creative hot streak in the mid-1970s, where barely anything he did was sub-standard, and while he hadn’t managed to fight his way to the single digits in the US charts, his work was receiving increasing amounts of acclaim for its deft approach to piano-driven pop.
However, despite having impressed with records such as Piano Man and Streetlight Serenade, when it came to assembling the tracklist for his 1977 album, The Stranger, he had a wave of anxiety about including one song that he’d recorded during the sessions. Feeling as though it wouldn’t fit with the mood of the rest of the album, he was inches away from scrapping it altogether until a famous friend convinced him to think again.
‘Just The Way You Are’ is perhaps one of his best-known songs these days, and is one of many tracks by the songwriter that have been covered by countless other artists. It would only peak in the charts at number three in the US, but did go on to scoop two Grammy Awards for ‘Song of the Year’ and ‘Record of the Year’ in 1979, two years after its release.
But because Joel didn’t feel as though it fit with the album, coupled with the fact that he and his band weren’t really fans of it, its omission from the tracklist on The Stranger could have dramatically altered the course of his career trajectory. Yes, it may be considerably slower than much of the material on the rest of the album, but his brilliance as a balladeer is on full display on ‘Just The Way You Are’, and the first person to notice this was Linda Ronstadt.
Ronstadt happened to be in the studio next door working, as was singer-songwriter Phoebe Snow, and when they both chose to pay Joel a visit during the recording sessions for The Stranger, they heard the song he was planning to ditch and gave him the sage advice to keep hold of it, noticing just how much potential it had.
In a 2008 interview with MassLive, Joel recalled that Ronstadt had said to him at the time: “You guys are crazy, you’ve gotta keep that on the album.” While Joel went on to explain that he personally didn’t like the gushing sentimentality of it, with him having written the song for his then-wife Elizabeth Weber, but eventually he relented, “Well, OK,” he replied. “I guess girls like that song, it’s a chick song.”
“Chick song” or not, ‘Just The Way You Are’ ended up being a career-defining song for Joel, and was the biggest hit he’d had up until that point. Whatever issues he and his band had had with it before, it was clear that the wisdom of Ronstadt was more than enough to convince him not to abandon it.
There would eventually be a period of time where Joel ended up omitting it from his live performances in the wake of his divorce from Weber, but he’s since relaxed his stance on the song again. Regardless of how he feels about the song, it’s one of many masterpieces that he produced, and we’re fortunate to live in the timeline where it got released.
