The soundtrack of the 1980s is incomplete without mentioning Billy Steinberg, the lyricist behind classics such as Madonna’s Like a Virgin, the Bangles’s Eternal Flame, the Pretenders’s I’ll Stand by You, and Cyndi Lauper’s True Colours. An admirer of the music of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, he initially aspired to be a singer-songwriter. But the pen proved mightier than his voice. The songwriter died of cancer in Los Angeles on February 16, 10 days before what would have been his 76th birthday.
“I started to write poetry before I ever wrote songs, and then I figured out that I could adapt these poems into songs. That was a moment of great revelation for me because I realised, ‘A songwriter — that’s me’. But of course, at that age, I wasn’t really thinking ‘I’m going to write songs for other artistes’. I wanted to be the artiste. And I was a great lover of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, and Donovan was popular at that time, and I wanted to be a singer-songwriter like those guys,” he said in an interview with Songwriting magazine in 2021.
Steinberg’s songs were overwhelmingly recorded by women, as he often approached love from a woman’s perspective. His lyrics carried an anthemic quality and remain widely streamed today.
The making of Like a Virgin
The song with which he is closely associated is Madonna’s Like a Virgin, the title track of the singer’s second album. He came up with the lyrics while “living and working in the desert”, driving a red Ford pick-up truck around the vineyard owned by his father. He drafted the framework of the song in that truck.
Writing on his website, he said he composed the song while in a new relationship after ending a “very difficult” one. That experience inspired lines such as: “Made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through… But you made me feel shiny and new, like a virgin.”
“Even before a note of music was written, it felt like I had something really potent,” he said. The lyricist said the song was a celebration of “that great feeling of optimism and hope when beginning what feels like a good new relationship”.
At the same time, Madonna’s career was flourishing. She had cultivated a provocative sound and look suited to MTV. In January 1984, she appeared on American Bandstand and declared, “I’m going to rule the world.” By the end of the year, buoyed by the success of Like a Virgin, she appeared well on her way.
Her pop-rock LP Like a Virgin entered the Billboard album chart at number three in December 1984, reached number one in February and, by the end of 1985, had sold five million copies. Produced by Nile Rodgers, one of the pioneers of 1970s disco, singles from the album — including Angel, Material Girl and the title track — blended disco, rock, 1960s pop and synthesiser-driven new wave into chart-friendly hits.
Album sleeves of some of Billy Steinberg’s top hits
In the video for Like a Virgin, Madonna became one of MTV’s defining early stars, openly flaunting her sexuality. She first appears in a white wedding gown wandering through a fairy-tale castle, contrasted with scenes of her dancing suggestively on a gondola in Venice.
From vineyards to global hits
Born in 1950, Steinberg moved as a child with his family to Palm Springs, where his father ran a table grape business in the Coachella Valley.
He developed a love of songwriting through radio, records from older friends and his father’s blues collection, which included Lead Belly, Josh White and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The Everly Brothers and Ricky Nelson were among his early favourites.
His affection for the English language stemmed partly from playing Scrabble with his mother. By junior high, he was the lead singer in a band. When the Beatles became popular, he was around 13 or 14 years old. At the time, he was singing songs such as You Really Got Me by the Kinks and We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place by the Animals.
At 18, his grandmother bought him a Gibson guitar as a graduation present. He began writing songs while studying literature at Bard College in the late 1960s, harbouring ambitions of becoming the next Bob Dylan. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker — later of Steely Dan — were Bard seniors when Steinberg was a freshman.
Severe anxiety attacks altered his path. He returned to Palm Springs and worked on his father’s vineyards, continuing to write lyrics while driving his red Ford pick-up truck. In his spare time, he wrote songs on guitar. By the late 1970s, he was fronting a rock band and performing in Los Angeles clubs under the name Billy Thermal, after the town of Thermal, California, where the family farm was located.
The year 1980 changed his life. He made demos of a song he had written, How Do I Make You. Craig Hull, the band’s guitarist, was dating Wendy Waldman, who was signed as an artiste to Warner Brothers Records and also toured with Linda Ronstadt as a backing singer. Without informing Steinberg, Wendy and Craig played the Billy Thermal demos for Ronstadt, who loved the song. She went on to record the song for her album Mad Love.
After Billy Thermal disbanded, Steinberg formed i-Ten with his creative partner Tom Kelly, whom he had met at a party hosted by Fleetwood Mac’s former producer Keith Olsen. They released the album Taking a Cold Look.
Many of his biggest hits were co-written with Kelly, including The Bangles’s In Your Room, Cyndi Lauper/Roy Orbison’s I Drove All Night, The Divinyls’s I Touch Myself and The Pretenders’s I’ll Stand by You. (I Drove All Night was originally intended for Roy Orbison, who recorded it in 1987, the year before his death, but his version was not released until 1991, while Cyndi Lauper’s version appeared in 1989.)
“I guess I’m in touch with my feminine side,” he once said. “I enjoy cooking, I collect beads, and I write pretty good songs for women.”
In the 1990s, he continued to produce hits, including Celine Dion’s Falling into You, which earned him a Grammy. After Kelly retired, Steinberg collaborated with producer Josh Alexander on songs such as The Veronicas’ When It All Falls Apart, t.A.T.u.’s All About Us and Demi Lovato’s Give Your Heart a Break.
Inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2011, he was described as one of the “most successful songwriters”, whose work had become “enduring classics”.
Announcing his death on Monday, his family said: “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.”
He is survived by his wife, Trina, and his sons, Ezra and Max.