Joel would start at the piano. Not playing a song — playing a phrase. A few bars of something classical, something you almost recognize, then a chord change that turns it into something from the Bronx. He’s been doing this since he was four, when his mother made him take piano lessons from a classical instructor who lived down the block in Hicksville, Long Island. He hated the lessons. He loved the piano.
He’d tell you about Hicksville the way he writes songs — with specific details that sound universal. The bar on the corner. The factory down the road. The guys who worked there and drank at the bar and told stories that were the same story every night but sounded different depending on how many drinks were involved. “Piano Man” isn’t autobiography. It’s an anthropology of that bar, transcribed by a 24-year-old who was playing there for $150 a week because his first album tanked and he needed the money.
“I was the piano man,” he’d say. “I was also John at the bar, the waitress practicing politics, and the man making love to his tonic and gin. You write what you see. I saw the same people every night. They were all me.”
The Digression
Ask Joel about one song and you’d get the history of six. They’re all connected in his head — the chord progression from “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” is a response to something he heard in a Beethoven sonata, which reminded him of a Ray Charles record his mother played, which reminded him of the time he saw Charles perform at a club in Manhattan when Joel was nineteen and broke and Charles’s left hand was doing something Joel still can’t fully explain.
He’d demonstrate. He’d play the Ray Charles thing — or his memory of the Ray Charles thing, which at this point might be more Joel than Charles but is better for the transformation. Then he’d play what he wrote in response. Then he’d play a Chopin etude that has the same bass motion. The connections are real. He hears music as a continuous conversation across centuries, and his songs are his side of that conversation.
He’d talk about “Allentown” and end up talking about the steel industry. He’d talk about “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and apologize for it — he’s called it a terrible song more than once, though he concedes it’s an effective one. He’d talk about “Vienna” and get quiet, because “Vienna” is about his father, who left when Joel was young and moved to Vienna and became a classical pianist in Europe while his son became a pop pianist in New York. The father-son thing is in every album if you know where to listen.
The Weight Behind the Stories
Joel attempted suicide in 1970. He drank furniture polish. He called a friend immediately afterward and was taken to a hospital. He’s spoken about it publicly, without dramatization, as the logical outcome of a failed album, a collapsing marriage, and a recording contract that was robbing him. He signed his first contract at 21. It gave his manager the rights to everything he wrote. He spent years and millions in legal fees getting those rights back.
He’d tell you about the contract the way he tells you about the bar in Hicksville — as material. The bitterness has been composted into narrative. He’s not angry about it anymore. He’s interested in it the way a novelist is interested in a character’s bad decisions: they’re the decisions that produce the best stories.
He stopped writing new songs in 1993. Not because he ran out of ideas — because he decided he’d said everything he wanted to say in pop music and didn’t want to repeat himself. He’s been playing sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden since 2014, monthly, performing the catalog. The shows keep selling out because the songs don’t age. They’re about specific people in specific bars in specific towns, and the specificity is what makes them universal.
He’d end the story where he started — at the piano, playing a phrase that’s half Beethoven and half Bronx, looking at you to see if you caught the connection. You probably didn’t. He’d play it again, slower. The second time, you’d hear it.
He writes about bars, factories, and the guys who drink in them. Every song connects to a Beethoven sonata if you listen long enough. The digressions are where the music lives.
Talk to Billy Joel — he’ll start at the piano. The story that follows could go anywhere.