When Billy Joel was putting together his 1977 album The Stranger, there was one song he wasn’t sure about releasing. In the studio, he got some sage advice and ended up including the track on the finished album.
The song? “Just The Way You Are”. And the advice came from none other than Linda Ronstadt. That song would go on to land in the U.S. Top 10 and the U.K. Top 20. Additionally, it has become one of his well-known and beloved tracks many years later.
But it almost wasn’t released. Joel initially wrote the song for his wife at the time, Elizabeth Weber. Despite the romantic origins, neither Joel nor his band liked the song much. He made the decision not to include it on The Stranger, but advice from both Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow changed his mind.
Ronstadt and Snow were recording in neighboring studios at the time. According to a 2008 interview with MassLive, “[Ronstadt and Snow] said ‘You guys are crazy you’ve gotta keep that on the album,’” said Joel.
He continued, “We said ‘Yeah? Well ok, I guess girls like that song, it’s a chick song.’”
Billy Joel and Elizabeth Weber divorced in 1982, and Joel didn’t perform “Just The Way You Are” for a while. He has said that he disliked playing it following the divorce. It stayed out of his repertoire until the 2000s.
In a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, Joel revealed that his drummer at the time, Liberty DeVitto, would often ad-lib lyrics when they performed the song. Instead of the correct chorus, DeVitto would say, “She got the house. She got the car.”
While “Just The Way You Are” has been described as “one of the most perfectly constructed songs in Joel’s catalog” by Ultimate Classic Rock, it remains a fact that Billy Joel hated it at first. That hatred ultimately comes down to its construction, believe it or not.
“Before we went in to record The Stranger I think I had ‘Just The Way You Are,’ but we did not have the right drum pattern for it,” Joel said in 2008. “I think we had it as a cha-cha which made us hate the song right off the bat.”
Once that drum pattern was figured out by Joel and the band, with help from producer Phil Ramone and advice from Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow, the song became a hit. Sometimes, it truly takes a village.
