“The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range

"The Way It Is" is the title song of Bruce Hornsby and the Range's debut album, and it smuggled a hard lesson about racism onto pop radio behind one of the most graceful piano figures of the decade. Hornsby wrote the words first, alone in his garage in Van Nuys in 1985, then built the music and that rolling piano lick around them. A demo with this song on it helped land him his RCA deal.

The song looks back at the prejudice he saw growing up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and name-checks the civil rights and anti-poverty laws of 1964 and holds them up against the way things still were. Hornsby produced it himself, and it went all the way to number one in America, Canada and the Netherlands.

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