Andrew's View of the Week

This is a series of posts about the music I play while writing.  This time we’re up to Piano Man by written and sung by Billy Joel.  Released in 1973 first as a single and then on his album, Piano Man this was his first major hit and in time became his signature song.  It’s hard to imagine listening to a Joel concert and him not playing this song.

Piano Man is largely autobiographical as it’s based on Joel’s real experience play in a piano bar durning 1972.  The story goes that Joel had signed a record contract with a company that wasn’t really working out when Columbia Records got interested in him. Joel decided he wanted to move to Columbia, but his current contract made that difficult so he decided to hide out for a while in L.A while Columbia’s lawyers worked to get him out of the contract. He still needed to earn a living so he took a job at a bar playing the piano while hiding out from the first record company.

The whole song came from Joel’s observations of the customers at the bar.  The music is simple and so are the lyrics.  It’s simple poetry and as Joel once observed they limerick like.  The power of the song is in those simple lyrics and how they tell a good story in few words.  For example, take the line, “Now Paul is a real estate novelist / Who Never had time for a wife” here we get the life story of a man in just two lines of seven words each.  In those 14 lines we learn Paul writes novels, is a real estate agent and hasn’t been married.  Similarly this leads to learn about “Davy who’s still in the navy.”

The lines about Davy bring to my mind the image of a few sailors I’ve know and I can just see Petty Officer Davy leaning on the bar drinking a beer.  The conversation between Paul and Davy is likely about politics or maybe Paul’s telling stories about his time in the military.

There’s nothing overly sophisticated about this song, like the rhyme “Davy in the Navy,” but that doesn’t get in the way of us getting a full picture of the activity in the bar from the customers, to the bar tender, manager and even the waitress.  The waitress in the song is actually Joel’s first wife Elizabeth Weber who worked at the same bar while Joel played the piano.

Joel has written a lot of music, having had 33 make the top 40 list and much of that far more complex music and lyrics.  Still, it is the simplicity and clear story that always bring me back to this song.  Like so many of the songs on my writing play list Piano Man gets my brain into a story telling mood and as the song says, “Gets me feeling alright.”

One of my favorite versions is this one: