The Way It Is

A few years after "The Way It Is" was released, Coretta Scott King asked Bruce Hornsby for permission to use the song for the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change. The request came after the track had already traveled a long way. Released in July 1986 as the second single from the debut album of the same name by Bruce Hornsby & the Range, it topped the charts in Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States, and reached the top 20 in at least eight other countries, including Australia, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Hornsby wrote the lyrics in 1985, working alone in his garage in Van Nuys, California, before developing the music and the piano lick. A demo tape featuring the song alongside "Mandolin Rain" and "The Red Plains" led to his signing with RCA that year. The song made explicit reference to the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Hornsby described it plainly as a song about racism. The final verse acknowledges those laws as victories while insisting more work remained, ending on the "line on the color bar" of a job application.

Hornsby later called the whole thing a wonderful accident. In his view, a song about racism with two improvised solos was hardly a formula for pop success, and everyone around him thought it should have been a B side. Then BBC Radio 1 played it, and the last place it hit was the United States. The music video was directed by Gerard de Thame and filmed on a London rehearsal stage.