Even the best artists can get sick of their work, as was the case for Billy Joel, who retired one of his best-known tracks.
Though he removed the song from his setlist, the Piano Man and Uptown Girl hitmaker has hinted the track could “come back” after a period away from the stage. The Stranger song has returned only briefly to the setlist for Joel, who has performed the song a total of 294 times. Though the track has been featured in performances from 2022, 2023, and 2024, the song slowly slipped out of the setlist once more, and has been infrequently featured in the decades preceding it. A period of five years saw Joel not play the song at all, and though he may be warming to it once more, it does not seem to be a staple of his set once again. Not yet, anyway.
Joel has hinted it could make a return on a more frequent basis should he return to performing. Rescheduled dates for Joel’s UK tour have since been cancelled following health concerns for the veteran performer. Whether he returns to the stage is yet to be seen, and it is also remains to be seen whether Just the Way You Are is performed.
Joel’s decision to retire the song from being a staple of his setlist was explained by the performer in 1990, who confirmed he was sick of playing the song. He said: “I’m just sick of it.
“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.
“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. I realised I shouldn’t be doing this song.”
Though he dropped the song from his setlist and infrequently returned to it for gigs in the 2000s and 2010s, its place in the running order is no longer permanent. Joel performed the song just three times last year, and did not play it at all from 2000 to 2005 as a solo act.
He did play it frequently with Elton John on their joint headline tour, though the most recent solo performance comes from a December 31 show at the UBS Arena in Elmont, New York. Before that, it was a performance on October 25 that heard the last of Just the Way You Are.
It may return once more, though, as Joel told Rolling Stone Magazine he had not ruled out playing it again. He said: “Maybe it will come back sometime, but I’m not ready to do it again. I realised it’s a gyp for me to do a song just because people expect it. It’s pandering.”
