Piano Man (5:37)

“Piano Man” was Billy Joel’s first major hit and is considered Joel’s signature song. The verses of the song are sung from the point of view of a bar piano player who focuses mainly on everyone else at the bar: John the bartender, the waitress, and bar regulars like Paul and Davy. Most of these characters have unfulfilled dreams, and the pianist’s job, it seems, is to help them “forget about life for a while”. The chorus, in bar-room sing-along style, comes from the bar patrons themselves, who plead, “Sing us a song. / You’re the piano man. / Sing us a song, tonight. / Well, we’re all in the mood for a melody, / and you’ve got us feeling alright.”

“Piano Man” has been released as a single and on several albums.

“Piano Man” is a fictionalized retelling of real people Joel met during his days as a piano-lounge singer in Los Angeles, after the failure of his first album, Cold Spring Harbor. Joel’s own personal feelings about this failure are expressed in the failed dreams of the characters in his song. At the time, Joel was trying to get out of a bad deal with the record company Family Productions, so, according to Joel, he was “hiding out” at the bar, performing under the name Bill Martin while Columbia Records tried to get him out of the deal.