By the time Billy Joel won Record Of The Year in 1977, for Just The Way You Are, he was fed up with being described a soft-rock balladeer. At the same time, he was selling out arenas and realised he needed harder, louder songs to fill those spaces. So, he raised the tempo, turned up the guitars, and scored his first ever US number one with It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me. “I could have come out with a record that would have guaranteed a certain amount of sales, by doing something similar,” he said in 2010. “Frankly, I would have been bored to do that. I would have been a dead duck, career-wise. You have to discard an audience to pick up another one.”
