“The Stranger” by Billy Joel

The title track of Billy Joel's 1977 album The Stranger opens like a late-night film noir: a lonely piano figure and a whistled melody drifting down an empty street, before the band barges in with a tough, strutting groove. Joel had pictured some kind of wind instrument carrying that tune, but when he whistled it to show how it went, producer Phil Ramone talked him into keeping it just like that.

Behind the lounge-lizard swagger sits a head full of Carl Jung: the song is Joel's tribute to the psychologist's notion of the Shadow. Liberty DeVitto on drums, Doug Stegmeyer on bass and Ralph MacDonald on percussion give it muscle. Japan went mad for it, sending the single to No. 2 on the Oricon chart and buying more than 471,000 copies, and the melody returns as an untitled hidden reprise at the very end of the album.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.