It’s the one of the only songs that Paul McCartney wishes he wrote himself, but Billy Joel’s ”Just The Way You Are” nearly didn’t make it onto the album, the singer has now revealed.
Back in 1977, with four albums under his belt, Joel was unsure he would ever have a hit as big as the signature song that gave him his nickname, “Piano Man”.
That hit, it would turn out, would be “Just The Way You Are”. But in a new interview with musician and video maker Rick Beato, Joel, 77, admitted he would have dismissed the song for being “too soft”, were it not for fellow music legend Linda Ronstadt.
Joel explained that he had been working on his fifth studio album The Stranger and needed a “bigger” song to fill the huge rooms he was now playing after the success of “Piano Man”.
Describing “Just The Way You Are” as “a nice soft ballad, love song,” Joel explained: “I didn’t even want to put it on the album because I thought it was too mushy.”
“Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow were in the studio, and we played the song for them. I said, ‘I don’t like this song that much’ and Linda Ronstadt goes, ‘Are you out of your mind? That’s a hit record. You’ve got to put that on the album. That’s a great song.’ ‘Really?’ She talked me into it. So I have to thank Linda Ronstadt for that song.”
A hugely popular musician in her own right, “You’re No Good” singer Ronstadt, 80, collaborated over the decades with many of the biggest artists of the 20th century, from Dolly Parton to Johnny Cash.
Beato then recalled how McCartney had named “Just The Way You Are” as one of the few songs he wished he’d written, which was ”one of the highest compliments that anyone could ever have”.
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“That blew me away,” Joel responded. ”He’s like the melodic king. He can do no wrong with melody, Paul… His melodic sense is incredible.”
Joel and McCartney have always spoken publicly about their admiration for one another, with Joel once recalling how seeing The Beatles make their US TV debut on The Ed O’Sullivan Show “changed my life”.
“Up to that moment, I’d never considered playing rock as a career,” he said.
McCartney would go on to share his own love of Joel’s song in the Club Sandwich newsletter in 1994.
”I don’t really want to have written anyone else’s songs, but, as a fantasy question… I remember thinking that Billy Joel’s first hit, ‘Just The Way You Are’, was a nice song, I’d like to have written that one,” he wrote.
