By admin 
Introduction
Picture Barry Manilow. You see the feathers, the sequins, the blinding smile, and the grand Steinway piano. He is the ultimate “Piano Man” of the soft rock era. But this image is a carefully constructed façade that hides a humble, slightly embarrassing, and acoustically essential truth. Before his hands ever touched the ivory keys of a piano, they were strapped into the bellows of a accordion.
In the grimy, post-war tenements of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a seven-year-old Barry Pincus wasn’t given a guitar or a drum set. His stepfather, a truck driver with a deep love for music, handed him a squeezebox. It was the quintessential instrument of the immigrant working class—portable, loud, and aggressively uncool. For years, Barry was the kid in the neighborhood lugging around a heavy box of air, learning traditional Jewish folk songs while his peers were discovering rock and roll.
But here is the twist that musicologists are only now appreciating: The accordion is the secret weapon behind his songwriting genius.
Unlike the piano, where you can get away with plucking single notes, the accordion forces a young musician to understand complex harmony instantly. The left hand of the accordion is a “chord machine.” You press one button, and you get a full major, minor, or seventh chord. By playing the accordion for years before touching a piano, Manilow’s brain was hardwired to think in dense, vertical stacks of sound rather than simple linear melodies.
When you listen to the lush, over-the-top orchestrations of “Mandy” or “Weekend in New England,” you aren’t hearing a piano player’s composition. You are hearing the muscle memory of an accordion player who knows how to fill every frequency of the sonic spectrum. He took the “uncool” density of the accordion and translated it to the pop ballad, creating a sound so rich it conquered the world.
So, while he eventually traded the bellows for the keyboard to become a global sex symbol (a transition that is undoubtedly harder to make with an accordion strapped to your chest), the DNA of that “hated” instrument is in every hit he ever wrote. Barry Manilow is the world’s most successful closet accordionist.