Vienna

"Vienna" opens side two of The Stranger and was first released as the B-side of "Just the Way You Are". It came from a trip Joel made to Vienna to visit his father, years after he started his music career. He saw an old woman sweeping the street and told his father he pitied her for doing such a menial job. His father replied that she was giving herself worth by doing a service that helped everyone. Joel tried to make the song feel Viennese and compared it to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, in particular The Threepenny Opera. The Guardian's 2016 Wembley review called it Kurt Weill-influenced.

Joel has called Vienna a metaphor for old age. In a 2008 interview he said the message was that you do not have to squeeze your whole life into your twenties and thirties trying to make it, and that there is a reason for being old. He named it, along with "Summer, Highland Falls", as one of his two favorite songs in 2008.

The song was played in a 1981 episode of Taxi called "Vienna Waits" and was prominent in the 2004 film 13 Going on 30. Joel has credited the film with the song's late popularity, especially among younger listeners. In concert, when he lets the audience pick between this and "Just the Way You Are", Vienna is most often chosen. Mac Miller covered it in 2015 under the name Larry Fisherman, and Ben Platt sang it in the 2019 finale of The Politician. Writing in 2022, Tim Grierson of MEL Magazine argued that, unlike Piano Man, it feels like something you discover on your own.