"Piano Man" was Billy Joel's first major hit and his signature song. "Piano Man" was released as a single in November 1, 1973, and has been on several albums. The song peaked at #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in April 1974.

"Piano Man" is a fictionalized retelling of Joel's experience as a piano-lounge singer in Los Angeles at the Executive Lounge and Joel has stated that all of the characters depicted in the song were based on real people. Joel had moved from New York to L.A. to record his first album, Cold Spring Harbor which was unsuccessful, in large part because of the mastering error by the album's producers at Family Productions, the first label that signed Joel. After this bad experience, Joel wanted to leave his contract with Family Productions for Columbia Records, but the contract that he'd signed made this very difficult. So Joel stated that he was "hiding out" at the L.A. bar, performing under the name Bill Martin, while lawyers at Columbia Records tried to get him out of his first record deal. Joel's own personal feelings about the failure of his first album and his professional frustrations at this time are expressed in the failed dreams of the characters in his song.

Piano Man may refer to:

William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.

Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.

Yann Tiersen (born 23 June 1970) is a musician from France. His musical career is split between studio albums, collaborations and film soundtracks with a distinctive sound that is always involved. It can be recognized by its use of a large variety of instruments; primarily the guitar, synthesizer or violin together with instruments like the melodica, xylophone, toy piano, harpsichord, accordion and typewriter.

Tiersen is often mistaken as a composer of soundtracks, himself saying "I'm not a composer and I really don't have a classical background", but his real focus is on touring and studio albums which just happen to often be suitable for film. His most famous soundtrack for the film Amélie was primarily made up of tracks taken from his first two studio albums.

Yann Tiersen was born in Brest in the Finistère département in Brittany in northwestern France, in 1970, into a family of Belgian and Norwegian origins. He started learning piano at the age of four, violin at the age of six, and received classical training at several musical academies, including those in Rennes, Nantes, and Boulogne. In the early 1980s when he was a teenager he was influenced by the punk subculture, and bands like The Stooges and Joy Division. In 1983, at the age of 13, he broke his violin, bought an electric guitar, and formed a rock band. Tiersen was now living in Rennes, and this turned out to be the perfect place for his musical career. In fact, Rennes is home to the three-day music festival Rencontres Trans Musicales, held annually in December, giving him the opportunity to see acts like Nirvana, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Cramps, Television, and Suicide. A few years later, when his band broke up, Tiersen bought a cheap mixing desk, an 8-track reel-to-reel audio tape recording, and started recording music solo with a synthesizer, a sampler, and a drum machine.