She's Always a Woman

Billy Joel wrote this song about his first wife, Elizabeth, whom he was married to from 1973-1982. When they first got together, she was still married to Joel's drummer Jon Small. Billy was so tormented by his affair that he made a halfhearted attempt to kill himself by drinking furniture polish. Ironically, the rocker was saved by the very man he was betraying when Jon Small rushed him to hospital.

Joel's then-wife Elizabeth was also his manager and worked in the music industry at a time when very few women did. Billy saw her take a lot of gruff in the working world and get called a lot of names, which led to him writing this song to defend her, in a way. He explained: "If you look at the structure of the song, it says, 'she can do this to you, she can do that to you, but she's always a woman to me.' That was the point of the song: they're bitching about her, and I'm saying, you can bitch all you want, she's great at business and she comes home and she's a woman with me."

This was a staple of Billy Joel's concerts in the late '70s, but when his marriage fell apart, he dropped it from the setlist, playing it only sporadically from 1980-2005. On one of his college tour shows, Billy said that it was about his first wife, who he didn't really want to be singing about in the first place. He explained that while he was singing it, he would start thinking about what meal he would eat after the show. No passion whatsoever, so he dropped it. In 2006, Joel returned the song to his live repertoire, often deadpanning at the end: "and then we got divorced."