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If You Share Your Loneliness, Are You Really Alone?
Billy Joel’s 1973 ballad Piano Man captures, half a century early, our modern society in all its wistful isolation
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There are human emotions, everyday realities of the human condition, that stay pretty much stable over time: love, fear, anger, passion.
And there are others that evolve and progress over time, to gradually swallow up an increasing number of us in their embrace. Perhaps the most significant of these, in our modern times and particularly in these first decades of the 21st century, is the sensation of loneliness.
Few songs capture that feeling more perceptively than singer-songwriter Billy Joel’s 1973 ballad Piano Man. His is not just an evocation of the feeling of being alone per se, but one set in the context of the community of loneliness. On the surface, that sounds like a non-sequitur. But one that this beautiful song brings meaning to, in all its sad truth.
Piano Man is based on Billy Joel’s real-life experiences as a piano bar musician in Los Angeles from 1972 to 1973, a period during which he…