Piano Man by Billy Joel

Piano Man, Billy Joel's second album, came out on Columbia on November 14, 1973, and it's the record that finally got him off the ground after a messy legal tangle with his old label, Family Productions. Michael Stewart produced it, and the sound is warm and wide open: pop, soft rock and a streak of country rock, built around a piano and a voice that sounds like it has spent a lot of nights watching other people drink.

That's the story of the title track, a fictionalized take on the characters Joel met while working as a lounge singer in Los Angeles, rolled out at a slow, swaying lilt. On the Billboard charts the single got as high as 25 on the Hot 100, and it climbed all the way to 4 among the Adult Contemporary crowd. "Captain Jack" is darker and more restless, slow-building and brooding; "The Ballad Of Billy The Kid" plays like a Western on a wide screen, and "You're My Home" is tender and plainspoken.

The album peaked at 27 on the Billboard 200 and made Joel a name, but the business side stung: it went gold in 1975, and he saw only $8,000 in royalties from it. British fans had to wait too, with a planned 1974 release pushed back to April 1975 on CBS.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.