"She's Got a Way" | ||||||||
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Artwork for the 1982 live re-release
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Single by Billy Joel | ||||||||
from the album Cold Spring Harbor and Songs in the Attic | ||||||||
B-side | "Everybody Loves You Now" "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" (1982) |
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Released | 1972, 1982 | |||||||
Format | 7" | |||||||
Recorded | July 1971 at Record Plant Studios, Los Angeles, CA June 1980 at Paradise Club, Boston, MA |
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Genre | Soft rock | |||||||
Length | 3:00 3:10 (live) |
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Label |
Family Productions (U.S.) Philips (UK) Columbia (live re-release) |
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Writer(s) | Billy Joel | |||||||
Producer(s) |
Artie Ripp Phil Ramone (live re-recording) |
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Billy Joel singles chronology | ||||||||
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"She's Got a Way" is a song by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, originally released on his first solo album, Cold Spring Harbor (1971) and as a single from that album in some countries. It was also featured as a single from the 1981 live album Songs in the Attic, peaking at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in early 1982.
"She's Got a Way" is a love ballad. The lyrics to "She's Got a Way" have the singer describing how various characteristics of a particular woman, such as her laugh, make him love her, even though he can't understand why. To music critic Mark Bego it a song about a woman who has "mesmerized" him. Joel biographer Fred Schruers describes the lyrics as a "plainspoken, never-quite-corny adoration of a loved one." According to a friend of the couple, Bruce Gentile, the song was written about Joel's first wife Elizabeth.
Schruers describes the song's melody as alternating between "surging" and "relenting." The original studio version has minimal instrumentation. The most prominent instruments are Joel's piano and some cymbal crashes. Schruers describes Joel's piano playing as "stately." On the 1983 reissue of Cold Spring Harbor, "She's Got a Way" also incorporated strings, which may have been inspired by a live performance at Carnegie Hall in New York City at which strings were included in the instrumentation. Schruers attributes some of the poignance of the song to the way Joel sings the final word of the final phrase "I don't know what it is/But there doesn't have to be a reason anyway." Schruers describes the last word "anyway" as hanging in the air, "trailing off" and "disrupting the tempo" and thus "seemingly giving in to the emotion" of love.
In a 1981 interview, Joel expressed mixed feelings about the song: "I thought it was cornball for years. I had trouble singing it at first. Then I got into it and decided everybody has a corny side, I suppose".