In my near-waking hours this morning, I had something of a lucid dream. Nothing of the fun stuff like flying or being superhuman, it was just a earworm of one of the songs I had heard the previous day: The Entertainer, by Billy Joel. Specifically, the lyric, "it was a beautiful song/but it ran too long/if you wanna have a hit/ya gotta make it fit/so they cut it down to 3:05". And that line just really stuck with me. I pretty much assumed it was a reference to his breakout hit, Piano Man, and it got me wondering, what would that song sound like in its full-length version. I felt a little sad that the recording never survived and was never released, so we’d never know what the full vision of the song was.
And that’s where the dreaming set in. I actually came up with other parts for the song in my head. The rhythm was in 4/4 as opposed to the song’s existing 3/4 time and it would shift between the 4/4 parts to tell one part of the story and 3/4 to tell the story in the original song. The extended version was a story about the protagonist, who is Joel, and two of his friends. One of the friends became a culinary chef and the other went into finance – all of the them remaining in New York. The beginning told a little bit of them as a young group before leaving school. Then a verse would provide a small snapshot of each one’s lives contrasted with the Piano Man verses illustrating Joel’s life.
And along the way, it had a message that all three were serving other people in their own way and although Joel’s chosen path was the least glamorous, he was no less satisfied with his work and was doing no less for his customers. It was quite the involved dream. I had bits and pieces of music and how the vocal would sound (which is something I could never emulate and the knowledge of that saddened me that I couldn’t bring this dream to realization – the lucid part of the dream).
Upon waking up and trying hard to not lose the details (which is fruitless as everyone knows), I did some searching on the meaning of The Entertainer lyric and Piano Man. Yes, I was right that 3:05 was a reference to the cut down version of the song. What I was wrong about was that there was s surviving version of the full-length song. It’s the one that’s on the album – 5 minutes, 40 seconds long. The only version I had ever heard was the full version, so what I was doing in my dream was turning it into an epic, more like Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.
Still though, it was a pleasant and invigorating dream, of which nearly all the details are lost at this hour.
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