"Piano Man" is the first single released by Billy Joel. It was released on November 2, 1973, and has been included on several subsequent albums. Joel's first major hit and his signature song, the song peaked at #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in April 1974. In 2016, the Library of Congress selected "Piano Man" for preservation in the National Recording Registry for its "cultural, historic, or artistic significance."

"Piano Man" is a fictionalized retelling of Joel's own experience as a piano-lounge singer for six months in 1972-73 at the now defunct Executive Room bar in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles. In a talk with The Actors Studio, Joel said that he had to get away from New York due to a conflict with his then recording company and hence lived in Los Angeles for three years with his first wife. Since he needed work to pay the bills, but could not use his better known name, he worked at the Executive Room bar as a piano player using the name "Bill Martin" (Joel's full name is William Martin Joel).

Joel has stated that all of the characters depicted in the song were based on real people. "John at the bar" was really the bartender who worked during Joel's shift at the piano bar. "Paul is a real estate novelist" refers to a real estate agent named Paul who would sit at the bar each night working on what he believed would be the next great American novel. "The waitress is practicing politics" refers to Joel's first wife Elizabeth Weber, with whom he moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1972 and who worked at The Executive Room as a waitress while Joel played the piano. Joel had moved from New York to L.A. to record his first album, Cold Spring Harbor, which was marred by a 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 had signed made this very difficult. So Joel stated that he was "hiding out" at the bar, performing under the name Bill Martin, while lawyers at Columbia Records tried to get him out of his first record deal.

The verses of the song are sung from the point of view of a bar piano player who focuses mainly on everyone else at the bar, who are said to arrive at nine o'clock on a Saturday: an old man, John the bartender, the waitress, businessmen, and bar regulars like "real estate novelist" Paul and US Navy sailor, Davy. Most of these characters have broken or unfulfilled dreams, and the pianist's job is to help them "forget about life for a while," as the lyrics state. The chorus, in bar-room sing-along style, comes from the bar patrons themselves, who say, "Sing us a song, / You're the piano man; / Sing us a song tonight. / Well, we're all in the mood for a melody, / And you've got us feeling all right." As for the lyrics, Joel admitted that with their 5-lines grouping, they were more in the form of a limerick than a typical poem.

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