He wrote pop hits of the 1980s and 1990s that were performed by music’s biggest names
LOS ANGELES:
Award-winning US songwriter Billy Steinberg, who wrote several top hit songs including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” died Monday at age 75, according to media reports.
Steinberg wrote some of the biggest pop hits of the 1980s and 1990s and was behind songs performed by singers from Whitney Houston and Celine Dion to Madonna and Cyndi Lauper.
He died following a battle with cancer, his attorney told the Los Angeles Times and BBC News.
“Billy Steinberg’s life was a testament to the enduring power of a well-written song — and to the idea that honesty, when set to music, can outlive us all,” his family said in a statement to the outlets.
Steinberg was born in 1950 and grew up in Palm Springs, California, where his family had a table grape business. He attended Bard College in New York and soon began his career in songwriting.
He helped write five number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 list. Among those was “Like a Virgin,” co-written with Tom Kelly, which spent six consecutive weeks at the top of the charts.
Steinberg won a Grammy Award in 1997 for his work on Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You.”
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2011.
In his mid-20s, he formed the group Billy Thermal, which eventually signed to Richard Perry’s Planet Records.
Their breakthrough occurred in 1980 when Linda Ronstadt heard their album and decided to record their song “How Do I Make You?” for her 1980 Mad Love album. The album went to the top three on the charts and went platinum, and Ronstadt’s version of their song reached the top 10.
Pat Benatar, on her 1980 album Crimes of Passion, covered another Billy Thermal song, “I’m Gonna Follow You”. In 1981. Steinberg wrote “Precious Time”, which became the title track for Benatar’s album Precious Time. Also in 1981, he began writing with Tom Kelly, who had written another song (“Fire and Ice”) on the album for Benatar.
When the song “Like a Virgin” was played for Warner Bros., executives thought it would be perfect for Madonna. Steinberg later recalled writing the lyric in 1983 after a failed relationship, saying that he had genuinely felt that he’d “made it through the wilderness” and that he was “beat, incomplete”. Madonna’s version of the song was No. 1 for six weeks in the United States in 1984. It became a worldwide hit and was the title track for her number one album.
