She's Got A Way: Love Songs (2013)
1. Travelin' Prayer
2. The Night is Still Young
3. This is the Time
4. She's Got A Way
5. Temptation
6. Nocturne
7. Until the Night
8. She's Right on Time
9. You're My Home
10.Just the Way You Are
11.She's Always a Woman
12.State of Grace
13.Honesty
14.This Night
15.Shameless
16.An Innocent Man
17.All About Soul
18.And So It Goes
It’s a testament to Billy Joel’s enduring presence that, two full decades after he last released a studio album of original material, his music continues to demand shelf space—and not just in hearts or on Spotify playlists, but in the form of physical product. And why not? The man still sells out stadiums, still haunts classic rock radio, and still elicits something bordering on religious devotion from his fans. In this light, Love Songs, a compilation devoted to Joel’s most sentimental leanings, seems less like exploitation and more like inevitability.
It would have been easy—almost too easy—for the curators to slap together a dozen or so of Joel’s smoothest adult-contemporary hits and call it a day. Thankfully, they didn’t. Love Songs is not the soft-focus, candlelit rehash one might expect. Instead, it's a surprisingly thoughtful compilation, one that attempts, however unevenly, to track the emotional undercurrents of Joel’s catalog rather than just its chart success.
That said, it’s a curious affair.
For starters, Joel has never truly been a “love song” artist in the conventional sense. His finest writing has always skewed autobiographical, theatrical, or socially observant. And while romance is hardly absent from his work, it rarely arrives in the form of pure, uncomplicated adoration. Love, in the Joelian universe, is often messy, conditional, bittersweet, or just plain doomed. This makes the compilation inherently more interesting than it might otherwise have been.
A few glaring omissions stand out—Leave a Tender Moment Alone and A Matter of Trust should have been included as essential. Their absence feels less like oversight than either licensing apathy or a misguided attempt to deepen the cuts. But it’s hard to argue with the overall strategy: more than half the songs here will likely be unfamiliar to casual fans, yet nearly all are deserving of fresh ears.
The selection is broad, occasionally brave, and refreshingly light on overplayed fare. Joel’s knack for melodic invention and lyrical character sketching is given room to breathe. There’s no grand thesis here, no overarching narrative or remastered revelation. But packed with 18 tracks and curated with more discernment than expected, Love Songs accomplishes something surprisingly rare in the reissue game: it feels less like a cash grab and more like a mixtape.
A mixtape, that is, from someone who’s been watching the fire burn low for decades—and still finds warmth in the glow.
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