The Stranger is the fifth studio album by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, released on September 29, 1977, by Columbia Records. It was the first of Joel's albums to be produced by Phil Ramone, with whom he would work for five subsequent albums.

Joel's previous album, Turnstiles (1976), had sold modestly, and peaked at only #122 on the US Billboard 200 charts, prompting Columbia to consider dropping him if his next release sold poorly. Joel wanted the new album to feature his touring band, formed during the production of Turnstiles. The band consisted of drummer Liberty DeVitto, bassist Doug Stegmeyer, and multi-instrumentalist Richie Cannata, who played the saxophone and organ. Seeking out a new producer, he first turned to veteran Beatles producer George Martin before coming across and settling on Ramone, whose name he had seen on albums by other artists such as Paul Simon. Recording took place over three weeks, featuring DeVitto, Stegmeyer, and Cannata. Other studio musicians filled in as guitarists on various songs.

Spending six weeks at No. 2 on the US Billboard 200 chart, The Stranger was Joel's critical and commercial breakthrough. Four singles were released in the US, all of which became Top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart: "Just the Way You Are" (No. 3), "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)", "She's Always a Woman" (both No. 17), and "Only the Good Die Young" (No. 24). Other songs, such as "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" and "Vienna", have become staples of his career and are frequently performed in his live shows. The album won two awards at the 21st Annual Grammy Awards in 1979: Record of the Year and Song of the Year for "Just the Way You Are". It remains his best-selling non-compilation album to date and surpassed Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Water (1970) to become Columbia's best-selling album release, with more than 10 million units sold worldwide. Rolling Stone magazine ranked the album number 70 on its 2003 list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", repositioned to number 169 in a 2020 revision. In 2008, The Stranger was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Before The Stranger, Billy Joel was on the verge of being dropped by his record label Columbia Records. After the unexpected success of Joel's second album, Piano Man (1973), his subsequent albums were commercially disappointing. Turnstiles, Joel's 1976 release, had peaked at only number 122 on the Billboard 200 chart.

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. Joel had mostly worked with session players for his first three studio albums, which contained only scattered contributions from his own backup musicians, and strongly disliked the polished sound of these albums. During the production of Turnstiles, his fourth album, Joel initially worked with veteran producer Jim Guercio, who had him work with members of Elton John's band; dissatisfied with the results, Joel instead opted to self-produce the album and record with his own touring band. Joel was likewise set on recording his fifth studio album with this band. Having written some new material for the record, Joel sought a producer who could cultivate his desired style. Joel, a longtime fan of the Beatles, initially looked to famed Beatles producer George Martin. But after meeting with Joel, Martin expressed interest in producing the album, but did not want to use Joel's band, wishing instead to bring in session players. Joel, however, was adamant in his desire to record with his own band and declined Martin's offer. Ultimately, Joel turned to Phil Ramone, a veteran New York City sound engineer and record producer who had recently worked with Paul Simon, another singer-songwriter, on Simon's album Still Crazy After All These Years (1975). According to Joel, he and Ramone met with each other at Fontana di Trevi, an Italian restaurant near Carnegie Hall, where Joel had been playing at the time. The restaurant would go on to inspire the setting of "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant", a song on The Stranger. According to Joel, Ramone expressed an appreciation for Joel's band and their energy, and understood the reasoning behind Joel's attitude towards recording, which ultimately led Joel to choose Ramone as the producer for his next album.

The recording sessions for The Stranger, described by Joel as "a blast" to be a part of, took place across the span of three weeks in between July and August 1977. The album contains nine songs, four of which were released as singles in North America. The songs were all recorded with Joel alongside his band, which he had formed while touring, in addition to various other musicians who were brought into the studio for specific songs. Despite the formation of Joel's band, the songs on The Stranger didn't feature any consistent guitarists, with different players instead featuring in each song, and according to Joel, the reason for the initial lack of a constant guitarist was because it was hard to find the right one. 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".

The opening song, "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)", centers around Anthony, a grocery-store employee from Long Island who "dreams of making it big", receiving pressure from his family to move out and go his own way. Joel stated in a Q&A session that he initially wrote the song's lyrics to the tune of the song "Laughter in the Rain" by Neil Sedaka, doing so without even realizing the similarity until it was brashly pointed out the next day by drummer Liberty DeVitto. Not wanting to waste all of the words he had come up with, Joel rewrote the song, coming up with a new melody that fit with the lyrics. 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.^{[full citation needed]} While composing the song, Joel whistled the track's signature theme for Ramone, claiming that he (Joel) needed to find an instrument to play it. Ramone told Joel that the whistling he did was perfect, and thus it was kept in the final recording. According to Joel in an interview with Today, the percussive rhythm used in the song came about while he was toying around with an Ace Tone Rhythm Ace drum machine, which contained a drum beat that he heard while scrolling through the machine's library of rhythm tracks. After hearing the beat, he thought that the rhythm would be nice to fool around with, and wrote the song shortly afterwards. "Just the Way You Are" was inspired by Joel's love for his wife at the time, Elizabeth Weber. He stated on a SiriusXM broadcast in 2016 that the melody came to him in a dream while he was working on The Stranger. He forgot about the melody shortly afterwards, but it came back to him while he was in a business meeting. Joel originally considered keeping the song off the album, as he dismissed it as a "gloopy ballad" that was out-of-place compared to the rest of the album. Ramone disagreed, and brought Linda Ronstadt and Phoebe Snow into the studio to prove that it was worth including. Upon hearing the song, the two artists both praised it, thus convincing him to feature the song. 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". Joel stitched the three songs together, inspired by the similar approach taken with side two of the Beatles' Abbey Road and by Freddie Mercury and Queen with "Bohemian Rhapsody", while Ramone helped intertwine them with backing orchestration.

The song "Vienna", which opens Side 2 of the album, was inspired by a trip Joel took to Vienna, Austria, to visit his father a few years after starting his music career. While there, he found that Austrians had a vastly different outlook on life than the one he was familiar with in America. As he recalls, Joel had this realization after taking notice of an old woman sweeping out on the city streets, telling his father that he pitied the woman for having to do such a menial and unimportant task; Joel's father responded by explaining that the woman was giving herself a sense of worth by doing a service that helped everyone rather than "sitting at home wasting away". 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. "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. "Only the Good Die Young" was written by Joel while opening for the Beach Boys in Knoxville, Tennessee, at which point it sounded slower-pace and more akin to a reggae tune, with Joel even singing the song's lyrics in a Jamaican accent. The mood of the song was shifted at the insistence of drummer Liberty DeVitto, who reportedly said to Joel "Why are you singing like that? The closest you've been to Jamaica was the Long Island Rail Road!" Ramone suggested that the song be played as a straight-four piece while DeVitto played a shuffle beat, a proposition that Joel found he enjoyed the sound of despite the concept initially seeming "odd and clunky". The song featured guitar playing by Hugh McCracken, a famous session player who Ramone brought in. "She's Always a Woman", like "Just the Way You Are", was written about Elizabeth Weber, described by Joel as "a commentary on women in business being persecuted and insulted". Joel tried to stylize the song as one that would be sung by Gordon Lightfoot. "Get It Right the First Time" is inspired by the challenge of first meeting and confronting a person, highlighting the importance of not flubbing such an encounter and "gett[ing] it right the first time". The album's final song, "Everybody Has a Dream", a gospel-influenced piece, was also inspired by Joel's wife. The song closes the album out with a reprise of the whistled theme from "The Stranger".