Billy Steinberg, the Grammy-winning songwriter who co-wrote such pop classics as Madonna’s “Like A Virgin,” Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” and the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” that were some of the biggest, most indelible hits of the 1980s and beyond, has died, his attorney confirmed to Billboard. Steinberg, who was 10 days away from his 76th birthday, died of cancer in Los Angeles.
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In addition to those three songs, Steinberg — who specialized in big, emotional power ballads with impactful, vulnerable lyrics — had two other songs reach No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100: Whitney Houston’s “So Emotional” and Heart’s Alone,” all co-written with his longtime writing partner, Tom Kelly.
The lyricist, who landed chart hits for more than 30 years, also penned such tunes as the Pretenders’ “I’ll Stand by You,” the Bangles’ “In Your Room” and the Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.” Taylor Dayne, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, Bette Midler, Cheap Trick, Belinda Carlisle and many other artists also recorded his songs.
In a statement to Billboard, Lauper called Steinberg “great lyricist and a wonderful collaborator. He and Tom had such a way of capturing the range within an emotion, from the subtlety to urgency…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.”
“I remember my mom picking me up from elementary school and there was this urgency and magic in the air,” recalls Steinberg’s son, Ezra, who is a songwriter signed to Sony Music Publishing. “I asked what was going on, and she said, ‘Dad has a hit.’ It was [JoJo‘s 2006 song] ‘Too Little Too Late.’ It was the first time I was old enough to really experience one of his hits, and to see the whole process — loving the demo for months, asking him every day when it was coming out, and then finally hearing it on KIIS-FM on the way to and from school. I felt this deep sense of pride and elation. That was magical.”
A 2011 inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Fresno, California, native grew up in Palm Springs, California. After attending Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley, he pursued a career as an artist with his band Billy Thermal. While they may not have flourished, Steinberg’s career took off after the group’s guitarist played “How Do I Make You,” penned solely by Steinberg, for Linda Rondstadt, who recorded it for her Mad Love album in 1980. The song reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Steinberg and Kelly, in addition to recording as the duo I-10 for Epic Records, were one of the top songwriting teams of the ‘80s and ‘90s, often writing signature songs for artists, including “Like A Virgin,” which remained at No. 1 for six weeks, the most of any of Madonna’s hits. Billboard ranked the song as Madonna’s biggest hit of her career in 2024.
After Kelly retired as a songwriter, Steinberg continued to write, often with Rick Nowels, including penning Dion’s “Falling Into You,” the title track for Dion’s 1996 album, which won album of the year for the 39th Grammy Awards and for which both Steinberg and Nowels took home a Grammy.
The two originally wrote “Falling Into You” with Marie-Claire D’Ubaldo for the Argentine singer’s album, but that album failed to take off. The songwriters bought back the track, complete with Paul Buckmaster string arrangements, for $15,000 so Dion could record it and added her vocals. The song went to No. 1 in a number of countries including Spain and Greece.
“Billy began as a poet and he developed a sense for that, an esthetic, where in one sentence or two sentences you can create a whole story. He was a one off. They won’t make another one. He had an encyclopedic knowledge, of popular songs and that’s where he and I connected,” Nowels says of Steinberg, whom he met in the early ’80s through Nowels’ wife as the two men were both experiencing their first flushes of success. “We just enjoyed each other’s brains. We enjoyed each other’s minds. We were friends to the very end.”
More recently, in the 2010s, Steinberg’s songs were cut by Nicole Scherzinger, Miranda Cosgrove and Demi Lovato, who took “Give Your Heart A Break” (co-written with Josh Alexander) to No. 16 on the Hot 100 in 2012.
At the Grammy Museum’s 2023 “The Power of Song: A Songwriters Hall of Fame Exhibit,” Steinberg was represented by a demo for “True Colors” recorded on a TDK SA 60 cassette and a note from Lauper that read, “Billy — Thanks for sending me and writing such a beautiful song. (heart) Cyndi.”
He is survived by his beloved wife, Trina; his sons, Ezra and Max; his sisters, Barbara and Mary; and his stepchildren, Raul and Carolina.
