The Stranger is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, released on September 29, 1977, by Columbia Records.

The band consisted of drummer Liberty DeVitto, bassist Doug Stegmeyer, and multi-instrumentalist Richie Cannata, who played the saxophone and organ.

[1] By 1976, Joel had formed a reliable touring band, consisting of Doug Stegmeyer on bass, Liberty DeVitto on drums and Richie Cannata on saxophone, flute, clarinet and organ.

Joel grew to appreciate this group of musicians, finding that they had a high-energy, rough-around-the-edges feel that he hoped to capture in his studio recordings.

[8] The photograph on the back cover of the album, featuring Joel, Ramone (donning a Yankees shirt at the time of the picture) and each of the band members, was taken at the Supreme Macaroni Company, one of several restaurants where the group would go to "have these crazy lunches and dinners".

[12] The album's title track, according to Joel, was written by him without any core themes in mind and could be open up to interpretation, though he stated that it could be seen as a song about a man with schizophrenia.

[11] The 71⁄2 minute epic "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", which follows a pair of young lovers from Long Island named Brenda and Eddie who go through a failed marriage, is three different, shorter songs: "The Italian Restaurant Song", "Things Are OK in Oyster Bay" and "The Ballad of Brenda and Eddie".

[11] Joel stitched the three songs together, inspired by the similar approach taken with side two of the Beatles' Abbey Road[15] and by Freddie Mercury and Queen with "Bohemian Rhapsody", while Ramone helped intertwine them with backing orchestration.

[11] Joel tried to make the song feel Viennese in nature and compared it to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, specifically The Threepenny Opera.

[14] "Only the Good Die Young", which is sung from the point-of-view of a boy trying to appeal to an abstinent Catholic woman, was inspired by a girl named Virginia Davis, on whom Joel had a crush in high school.

According to Joel, he saw Davis looking at him while he was playing in his high school band, The Echoes, which was the event that had him "completely hooked" to the prospect of being a musician.

The second single from the album, "Just The Way You Are", peaked at number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart,[11] having received a boost in popularity following Joel's performance of the song on an episode of Saturday Night Live.

[19][20] The Stranger remains one of Joel's best-selling original studio albums to date, receiving a Diamond certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for surpassing sales of 10 million units.

[19] At the time, it had surpassed Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water to become Columbia Records’ best-selling album release.

In a contemporary review of the album, Ira Mayer of Rolling Stone deemed it an improvement over Joel's previous studio efforts, praising its musical variety and Ramone's production.

[32] In a less enthusiastic review, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau graded the album "B−" and held it slightly above Joel's previous works; speaking specifically of Joel himself, he wrote that the artist had "more or less grown up" with what he considered less egotistical songwriting, and that he is "now as likeable as your once-rebellious and still-tolerant uncle who has the quirk of believing that OPEC was designed to ruin his air-conditioning business".

[33] Retrospectively, Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine described The Stranger as "a concept album of sorts, an ode to the singer's native New York underscored by his paranoid obsession (and resistance) to change".

[38] Phil Ramone would continue to serve as Joel's producer for a number of years, working with him on each of his albums up through 1986's The Bridge.

[39] In 2017, to celebrate the album's 40th anniversary, a picture-disc vinyl rerelease of The Stranger with newly remastered audio was released by Brookville Records on October 20.

Though never released as a single, "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" is a staple of his live set, named by Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield as Joel's equivalent to Bruce Springsteen's "Jungleland".

The limited deluxe edition of The Stranger includes a CD of the original album in its entirety (remastered by producer Phil Ramone), and a second CD of a previously unreleased concert featuring Billy and his band, Live at Carnegie Hall 1977, recorded at the historic Manhattan venue on June 3, 1977, one month before the sessions for The Stranger album.

The Deluxe Limited Edition included a DVD showcasing two live promotional videos from The Stranger; and Joel's performance on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test, a seldom-seen 60-minute set from 1978 that aired only once on the UK's BBC2.