{"id":11850,"date":"2025-07-21T22:14:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T22:14:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/11850\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T22:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T22:14:07","slug":"paul-mccartney-reveals-the-billy-joel-song-he-wishes-hed-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/11850\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul McCartney Reveals the Billy Joel Song He Wishes He’d Written"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul McCartney Reveals the Billy Joel Song He Wishes He’d Written<\/a> originally appeared on Parade<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Paul McCartney has penned some pretty iconic songs over the course of his storied career, from “Let It Be” to “All My Loving.” But there’s one tune that took the music world by storm in 1997 that the legendary Beatle, 83, wishes he’d written: Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.”<\/p>\n

“When I first heard Billy, it was like ‘Oh, wait a minute. He’s good. Who’s this?’,” McCartney recalled in the new HBO Max documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes. “You know, like you do, your ears prick up. The song that really made me know that that was happening was ‘Just the Way You Are.’ And where I get asked, ‘Is there a song that you wish you’d written?’ And I always … that’s the one I always say.”<\/p>\n

The song almost didn’t make it on Joel’s album The Stranger, though.<\/p>\n

“[Producer] Phil Ramone was the one who was pushing to have that song. But it just didn’t feel right to me,” the 76-year-old singer admitted in the doc. “It was too mushy.”<\/p>\n

The band workshopped the song in the recording studio, and Joel started to come around to it.<\/p>\n

“I heard the playback and went, ‘Okay, it’s a nice recording, well-written,” he said. “But I don’t think it should be on the album. So Phil, he brings in a couple of people and they’re listening to it and they’re looking at each other like … ‘That’s one of the best songs we’ve ever heard.'”<\/p>\n

\ud83c\udfac SIGN UP for Parade’s Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox<\/a> \ud83c\udfac <\/p>\n

Still, the Piano Man had his reservations. “I said, ‘I don’t really want to put it on the album,'” he shared. “[And they said,] ‘You’re crazy. That’s got to be on this album. It’s a big hit.’ I said, ‘It is?'”<\/p>\n

It was. In 1979, Joel went on to win two Grammy awards for “Just the Way You Are,” including Song of the Year and Record of the Year.<\/p>\n

Paul McCartney Reveals the Billy Joel Song He Wishes He’d Written<\/a> first appeared on Parade on Jul 21, 2025<\/p>\n

This story was originally reported by Parade<\/a> on Jul 21, 2025, where it first appeared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul McCartney Reveals the Billy Joel Song He Wishes He’d Written originally appeared on Parade. Paul McCartney has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,9053,134,136,13683,13684],"class_list":{"0":"post-11850","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-billy-joel","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-paul-mccartney","14":"tag-phil-ramone"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}