These people are in a bar, and they hate being there. Instead, the song focuses on a situation anyone can relate. Aaron / Redferns That’s a great cast of characters, but what makes Piano Man so special is how Joel weaves them into the song’s plot.īoy, is this song’s plot good, and unlike some more pretentious art, it’s not complicated. The Piano: This is The Piano Man’s significant other. The more the weed kicks in, the more he digs his feet that nobody will ever top The Wire in terms of cultural importance. He took an edible before coming into the bar and now he’s ranting about The Wire at The Waitress, and they’re cross-talking about their favorite shows. The Businessman: Okay, this is the darkest character in this song.
Like, don’t bring it up with her even if you’re a fan, too.
The Waitress: Oh God, she thinks she’s political because she watches Handmaid’s Tale. We should really be ashamed of ourselves as a society that we haven’t created an environment where Paul feels safe declaring who he is to the world.ĭavy, The Sailor: While Davy won’t die in the line of duty, his body will waste away entirely because of radiation poisoning from too much time spent on a nuclear sub. For now, he tells everyone he doesn’t have time to date. He’s secretly gay, which is tragic because he’s waiting until his parents die to come out of the closet.
He writes a popular book series about the top real estate firm in Los Angeles, and he’s currently debating if he should option his series into a Ballers-esque HBO series… only about real estate instead of football, of course. Paul, The Real Estate Novelist: Everybody thinks they can write, and Paul is no exception. Ten years from when this song takes place (on a Saturday at nine o’clock), he’ll look in the mirror, discover he isn’t young anymore and kill himself because he’ll realize his dreams are dead. He’s vaguely good looking and thinks that means he can act. John, The Bartender: We all love The Bartender. He has a fetish for alcoholic drinks, and he openly fucks his drink while asking The Piano Man to play the song he’s thinking of, which he can’t really explain, but he remembers hearing it when he murdered a young man and then wore his clothes. The Old Man: He’s the first person mentioned in the song. People want him to play songs because that’s his job. The Piano Man: This is the guy who is playing piano. That’s the kind of simplicity that sets the stage for the rest of the song to pull me into its dark but easy world with a cast of kooky characters whom everyone could relate. I want a song that tells me in the very first line when it takes place (at nine o’clock on a Saturday), then tells me who is there (the regular crowd), and in both the title and chorus, tells me exactly who is narrating (The Piano Man). But while Mangum’s music doesn’t functionally sound that much different from Joel’s, his lyrics are a cryptic puzzle box that need to be decoded to understand, only adding to the confusion of life. Go listen to some Neutral Milk Hotel, and you’ll find that Jeff Mangum sounds like Billy Joel trying to sound like Neil Young. Simplicity is Piano Man’s greatest strength. Thankfully, the universe has gifted me a cure to the disease of chaos, and the cure is Billy Joel’s Piano Man, the greatest song ever written. When I think about anything at all that’s currently happening in the world, I get a small panic attacks resembling ministrokes. Currently, we are living in a timeline that seems to be from Joker’s fever dream, a chaotic evil hell world that is set to die in about thirty years but nobody seems to care.