Piano Man: A Lesson for Writers

8 min readNov 4, 2021

Billy Joel’s story has inspired young musicians for decades.

The working class troubadour who broke into the charts from smoky bars and wooed the world with a series of insanely popular piano tunes.

His signature tune, ‘Piano Man’, is 48 years old today. The following is clunky exposition, this eponymous hit should serve as inspiration for young writers and business owners when producing content for websites, blogs, social media, PR and media strategy.

Why?

Companies with the most successful content marketing create materials that effectively connect or resonate with audiences

Now that sounds like spin. But it’s not, it is simply the principle of good writing.

AABBA

Limericks are a novelty technique.

A five-line verse form with a strict AABBA rhyme scheme, most often used to be funny or rude.

They are not used in serious writing circles or taken seriously in modern culture.

Right?

Piano Man itself is a nice piece of music. Performed in the key of C major with a ¾ waltz time signature. It starts with a jazz-style piano solo and progresses with a harmonica and piano.

And then launches into ….a series of limericks.

“Now John at the bar is a friend of mine
He gets me my drinks for free
And he’s quick with a joke, or to light up your smoke
But there’s some place that he’d rather be”

Hickory Dickory Hit!

Piano Man contains some of the world’s now most well-known limerick verses, the Hickory Dickory Dock for adults.

Joel himself has publicly described some embarrassment of the simple style he employed (the first two lines don’t always rhyme, but the meter is right and other lines rhyme in AABBA style).

“It is a limerick with a bunch of ‘la la diddy da’s’ thrown in,” he said.

He even admitted in later years of second-guessing himself so much that he nearly did not put out the song in its original form.

And the world loses one of its great sing-a-longs.

This is what should inspire young writers and companies when producing content for websites, blogs, social media, PR and media strategy.

Any concerns he held failed to override a gut feeling that the song was good just the way … it was.

And, crucially, he felt that audiences might like it.

As we know they fell in love with the song and its characters. The real estate agent with unfulfilled dreams, the barman whose job was killing him.

Audiences engaged and connected. They loved it and so do the Library of Congress.

In 2015 the United States’ oldest federal cultural institution selected Piano Man for preservation in the National Recording Registry for its “cultural, historic, or artistic significance.”

Billy Joel performing live in the 1970s.

Go with your intuition

Consider why you are writing.

If you just want to play it safe and post content to keep up with competitors, then fill your boots. That’s easy.

Or do you want to stand behind the most successful content marketing you can produce?

To truly make emotional connections with audiences, grow authority and stand out from competitors?

If you want the latter you are playing the game correctly.

But you will not get there playing safe.

The most successful content marketing will connect.

If you are just going through the motions, don’t expect a reader to answer your call to action.

Write for yourself, sure, but more importantly, write for the audience.

Be aware of what they want to hear.

This skill may be more innate than teachable. But find it and you have likely found your strongest and most unique point-of-difference in often cluttered markets.

The contemporary demand from online audiences and search engine crawlers is for informative, interesting and entertaining owned content that makes a connection with audiences.

So be rebellious.
Be honest.
Be innovative.
Be brave.
Do more.

Ernest Hemingway once said that “there is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

No one is expecting literature from content marketing, but they have similar touchstones. Particularly now that audiences and search crawlers are shunning advertorial and advertising marketing.

The idea of captive audiences are gone and consumers are only ever a click away from moving on. So how can you convince them to stay on your platforms?

Touchstones of Writing

The three touchstones of good writing are universality, individuality and suggestion.

The idea is fairly basic. Universality is finding relatable topics. Individuality is finding a unique style. And suggestion is a call to action.

Another way to think of it is that most consumers will not actually care about your story a great deal.

Audiences, and potential clients, care about their own story and how you can assist. You should aim to tell your story in a way that is relevant to their story.

For professional services, where client relationships are paramount and intimate, the golden ticket of contemporary marketing is content. Seek that connection.

What do I write?

Content marketing is basically publishing relevant articles, videos, podcasts and other media online to attract, engage and retain an audience.

The success bit is simply “telling your story” — as some marketers say — in an interesting way with the needs of the audience the focal point. That’s it.

This is more crucial for professional services which are basically relationship businesses.

Australian advertising creative director Dee Madigan describes it well.

“If your agency promises to do something like ‘build an authentic brand story that is true to your firm’s values and mission statement, aligning strongly with the services you offer to clients while remaining genuine and heartfelt’ then the best thing you can do is run”.

Content, style, focus and format flows will be directed by the ideas. Getting to the core of that is a big topic and one for another day.

There are few guidelines…

Emotional marketing is connecting with prospects, public and stakeholders in a meaningful way.

So you develop content to provide audiences a glimpse of who you are as a business.

You highlight the collective and individual expertise and experience that will enable you to fix their problems. That you appreciate their needs and situations.

And the personal qualities you bring to a professional relationship that a client may connect or identify with. But you know all that.

It is just the skeleton on which you build the muscle, brain and fat.

…but not many

When you start with a major newspaper or magazine there is no guardian of knowledge standing at the door with riding instructions or a guide on how to write.

You might get a localised Style Guide that highlights frequently misspelt words and key information like how courts work, why defamation is important and a beginners guide to the Westminster System.

But there is no discussion of syntax.

Guess what? Editors actually want to see what you can do.

They hired you to provide them — and their audiences — a point-of-difference.

They are certainly forward in pointing out mistakes along the way, mostly with punctuation or spelling, and only offer ideas to improve your writing and syntax once they have a body of work.

But for beginners luck, you get a desk, a story to write and a blank page.

Writing is about putting things together in a way so as to have a conversation with audiences. Where they read your words and respond in their minds.

And so should it be with your content marketing.

Let modesty be such a lonely word, because it is not mostly what your audience needs from you.

As Nike said: “Just Do it.”

Revision comes later. For now, bleed.

JM Gregory is a seven-time award-winning journalist and writer.

To find out more about PR, content creation and reputation management, visit Advocacy Communications.

What is Piano Man about?

The verses of the song are sung from the point of view of a bar piano player who focuses mainly on the “regular crowd” that “shuffles” into the bar 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 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 pianist makes money when the patrons “sit at the bar, and put bread in my jar, and say, ‘Man, what are you doin’ here?’” 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.”

The above three paragraphs were taken directly from Wikipedia.

We did this to point out plagarism. It goes without saying — never do it.

If you can, always create yourself. If you use another work, try to do it sparingly, and always reference. Thirdly, never just swap a few words around and claim it as original work. This is still plagarism. You don’t have to claim to have done everything. In this case the description is accurate, Wiki gets a free backlink and we get to save a few minutes.