Songwriter Billy Steinberg passed away today, just ten days before his 75th birthday. His first huge hit was “Like a Virgin,” which became the title track of Madonna’s sophomore album. The song was #1 for six weeks. He said he wrote the song after a breakup when he felt he’d “made it through the wilderness” after feeling “beat, incomplete.”
His other hits include:
True Colors by Cyndi Lauper
So Emotional by Whitney Houston
Eternal Flame by the Bangles
Alone by Heart
I Touch Myself by the DiVinyls
I’ll Stand by You by the Pretenders
I Drove All Night by Cyndi Lauper/Roy Orbison/Celine Dion
All About Us by t.A.T.u.
Too Little Too Late by JoJo
ETA: Cyndi Lauper released a statement about his death:
“I’m so sorry to hear of Billy Steinberg’s passing. He was a great lyricist and a wonderful collaborator. He and [his songwriting partner] Tom [Kelly] had such a way of capturing the range within an emotion, from the subtlety to urgency. When I think back across ‘True Colors,’ ‘Unconditional Love,’ ‘I Drove All Night,’ ‘My First Night Without You,’ and ‘Heading West,’ I’m wowed. I mean, come on, ‘I’m like a letter with no address.’ Pure genius. For ‘True Colors,’ there was a lot of back and forth which I know was hard for him. In the end, he said that I had really invented my own ‘very exquisitely beautiful version’ of the song. That really meant a lot to me. It is a special song.”
Steinberg initially wrote “True Colors” about his mom, but Lauper then amended it to be about a friend who died of AIDS during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. “He died of AIDS, and [‘True Colors’] was for us to feel better,” she told People in 2023 on the red carpet of the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of her new documentary Let the Canary Sing. “He had wanted me to write a song for him, and I tried.”
