You can hear me tell it to Joseph Moore in the latest edition of Cultish Creative Music Club, but I am the guy who couldn’t change the channel fast enough (radio channel, ahem, in the car, in years past) whenever “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” by Billy Joel would come on.

I didn’t hate the song, I just didn’t want to sit through almost 8 minutes of piano and occasional sad sax if it wasn’t a full-listen on the record player, which was an even more rare experience, but a real one, nonetheless.

Tony Greer pitching the song surprised me, and scared me, because I knew that was where my brain went first with this song. “Skip!” Not exactly a way to flatter a pitch. But this is the cool part about this experiment. He submitted and I gave it the ol’ college listen.

And, wouldn’t you know it… this is a song. Like, a SONG. I had so many ideas.

Watch our video discussion so you can get my main points, and Joseph’s Italian restaurant American history lesson which is amazing, but I wanted to spend a minute in this post going one more level deeper into the musicality of the piece.

I hear a combination of Broadway musical medley and overture with words when I hear this song. For the uninitiated, an overture is the preview piece of the various themes and melodies you’ll hear in the rest of the production, previewed for you in snippets before the curtains come up. Medleys sometimes show up later in shows, as a recap, or in high school productions, also as a recap, when you want to quickly gloss through the hits.

Neither of those are what’s going on in “Scenes” though. Billy Joel is using that template without doing that template. And, he’s also rejecting another template.

Did I mention this song really impressed me? It did.

Joel is also not doing the rock opera thing. This also isn’t Queen or Meatloaf or Led Zeppelin, or take your pick of other mid to late 70s too long songs. Largely because Joel makes no use of choruses in his version, and overly focuses on the lyrics, more like a folk song but not at all sounding like a folk tale.

The song IS called “Scenes.” That’s the whole trick in a nutshell. It plays like an audible film. Each section of the story has its own musical framing, we jump backwards and forwards in time in both music and narrative, and much like life as Joseph put it in our conversation, there’s no clear and obvious everybody sing along chorus.

This is not a song I’m going to be playing start to finish regularly, but it is a song I am in awe of, especially after sitting down to listen so closely, and then talk out. Tony did great here. Listen to Joseph and I break it down on this episode: