And The Writer Is...with Ross Golan - Ep. 185: Billy Steinberg

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Today’s guest is a songwriting hall of fame who has been a fixture in the writing scene for decades. Defining and launching careers one lyric at a time, this writer has crafted anthems for Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Whitney Houston, Heart, The Bangles, Pretenders, Linda Ronstadt, Jojo, Demi Lovato, and many more. As much as these songs launched these artists into space, they also established this writer as one of the best writers in pop history. A Californian from humble beginnings, this writer has shown that the craft of songwriting can be as timeless as the songs themselves. And The Writer Is…Billy Steinberg! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to And The Writer Is with Ross Golan. There are millions of singers, thousands of artists, and only 40 songs per genre at a time. These are the stories of the hottest creatives, the most venerable legends, artists, songwriters, executives, and more. Follow our socials and share your music with the and the Writer is community. We'll see you all there and now. Here's this week's episode. ChartMetric is proud to sponsor the upcoming upcoming. coming season of and the writer is.

As the go-to source for up-to-date global social streaming and audience data for artists and music industry professionals, chart metrics strives to ensure everyone can have a successful career in music. They're easy to understand in powerful analytics on over 10 million artists and 100 million tracks will help answer all of your questions from tracking your stats to discovering new talents. Throughout this season, we'll be showcasing chart metric data to reveal insights about our featured artists like how Noah Khan is currently the top performing artists from Vermont by Spotify monthly listeners. Plans start as low as $10 a month. Learn more and get started today

at chartmetric.com. Hey guys, I'm excited to tell you a little bit about one of today. sponsors, Peer Music. During a time of intense consolidation in the music industry, peer music's rich legacy is something that can't be bought. Peer music has been family run since it was founded in 1928. From its entrepreneurial roots, the company has grown into one of the largest and most respected independent music publishing and neighboring rights companies in the industry. They have 39 offices in 32 countries, so they are big enough to help your music reach the entire world. Peer music represents. some of the biggest names in music, including our former guest, Poo-Barre, David Lee Murphy, David Foster,

nothing but thieves, Gabby Moreno, Cheyenne, the Trague, and many, many more. And peer music neighboring rights represents over 300 record labels and more than 3,000 artists, including Billy Eilich, Imagine Dragons, Martin Garrick, David Gata, Metallica, Megan the Stallion, Her, and Strom A. Delivering nearly 100 years of music publishing excellence, peer music is a trusted and widely respected leader in our music community. want to learn more, I recommend you go to at Peer Music on all their social media sites and check out PeerMusic.com.

Let me tell you about ASCAP. ASCAP is America's only creator-first performing rights organization and the only one that operates on a not-for-profit basis. They were founded by songwriters, composers, and publishers, and they're still governed by them today.

ASCAP's main job is to pay you royalties when songs you write are streamed, broadcast on radio or TV or played live. And they're so good at collecting royalties that in 2023, they distributed a record $1.592 billion to ASCAP members. But they do other things too. In fact, they go to Washington all the time to advocate for your songwriter rights,

which is more important than ever in the age of AI. Askap represents over 975,000 members, including this episode's guest, Billy Steinberg. If you are a songwriter or composer, ASCAP is where you belong. You can learn more about joining ASCAP at ASCAP.com forward slash why join and follow at ASCAP on socials.

Hey, if you've listened to this podcast for the last few years, you know about LAMP. LAMP is the Los Angeles Academy for artists and music production located in Santa Monica a few blocks from the beach. They have an incredible campus, they have common areas with the live, stage and they host open mics, but most importantly, they have 15 recording studios.

With a world-class one-year intensive high-level music program founded by Stargate, our good friends and super producers who did songs like Firework and What's My Name, Diamonds, irreplaceable, think of Lamp as a nine-month high-level songwriting camp featuring world-class mentors that they've had, you know, Betty Blanco, Circuit, Emily Warren, Neo, Diplo, Stargate themselves, Nip, Jimmy Naves, Kenny Beetz. They've had presidents of publishers, companies, major A&R executives, they've had super producer managers like Jay Brown, who has Rihanna. They have top-rated mixing engineers, vocal producers, lawyers, business managers, all kinds of business professionals that help you with a Wednesday, Thursday workshop that

they're so known for. They've now been going on their fourth year. So if you want to learn more information about LAMPMUIC.com, that's lampmusic.com. Thank you for being fans of this podcast lamp because we are fans of yours. Welcome to And The Writer is. I am your host, Ross Golan. Today's songwriter Hall of Famer has been a fixture in the writing scene for decades and decades and decades. Defining and launching careers one lyric at a time, this writer has crafted epitomic records for Madonna, Cindy Lopper, Whitney Houston, Hart, The Bengals, Pretenders,

Linda Rosset, Jojo, Demi, Lovato, etc. etc, et cetera, et cetera. But as much as these songs launched these artists into space, they also established this writer as one of the best writers in pop history. A Californian from humble beginnings, this writer has shown that both the craft of songwriting and the results can be timeless. And the writer is, my friend, Billy Steinberg.

Hey, that's a big introduction. I hope I can live up to it. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, I said from humble beginnings. And I love, I love at least what I've read about your beginnings. We've talked a little bit, but I feel like I know your career is starting from about 19, your life from about 1980 moving on. There was a lot of time before that.

So, you know, you're born, you were, you're an actual original Californian. I didn't know that they existed. Yeah, I was born in Fresno. Okay. And when I was eight years old, my family moved to Palm Springs. Okay. So I essentially grew up in Palm Springs. Okay.

Well, Fresno's, I mean, that's an agricultural center. My father was a farmer. Right. What kind of farmer? Grapes. For wine or for grapes? No, seedless table grapes. Okay.

Is that situation where for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it was like grapes, grapes, grapes, grapes, or is it I don't ever want a grape again? I love grapes. When you have grapes now, do you feel like a kid in either Fresno or Palm Springs, or do you not associate it with your childhood? Well, you know, just to give a little context to it, I went to Bard College in upstate New York, and when I got out of college, I went right to work for my father in Thermal, California,

in his vineyard, and he had over a thousand acres of taking. Gables. So it wasn't quite as humble a beginning as you implied. But so I, you know, I worked out in the vineyards and learned to speak fluent Spanish. But even before I went to work in the vineyards, while I was at Bard College, I started writing songs. So I just kept working in agriculture, but writing songs. When you, before you went to Bard, what did you study at Bard? Literature. So when you grew up, Palm Springs isn't nearly as rural as Fresno, but it's still not,

you know, it's not Los Angeles. It's not New York City. Was your childhood based around books and music? Is that what inspired you to get into that? Were your parents into music? My parents weren't so much into music, but starting from about the age of seven, I started tuning into pop music and rock music. Built up a big collection of 45s, vinyl 45s, and I was absolutely obsessed with my record collection. If I picked up the, what do you call that thing, you know, on the turntable, the needle? Yeah, if I put the needle down on a record, like if it was come softly to me by the Fleetwoods

or all I have to do is dream by the Everly Brothers, it would just be blissful for me. And I also used to like to play baseball, and I had a lot of friends. We played a lot of sports. And I used to play these records for my friends. And when the record was playing, I was so happy. and I'd look at my friends and they would be distracted and it used to sort of disturb me that they didn't feel what I felt hearing those songs.

And I used to study the label and it would say Oudlow and Felice Bryant were the songwriters or Bert Baccarac and Hal David or it would say Carol King and Jerry Gauphin or you know Doc Pommis and Mortimer Schumann and I knew who wrote all the songs.

So I just tuned into it as a child. Yeah, it's amazing how much that era at the beginning of the Brill Building, even before, I mean, you're talking about before Brill Building moving into the Brill Building, I mean, obviously, Doc Pomas and going into Carol Kane and Gauphin and all that, that becomes more Brill Building. But going into that era and sort of seeing the

transition of the music business being post-World War II, just giving some context. It's sort of now you've got Ed Sullivan breaking stuff, you've got TV breaking stuff, and this whole movement into it. It probably helped feel like the world was bigger than Palm Springs at that point. I mean, at 7, you weren't even in Palm Springs yet.

No, no, but it was interesting. You know, the way music is, was at that time divided in Palm Springs. Small town, there were three record stores. One of them was called Patty's Records, and that's where you would buy your pop singles. That's where you'd buy Neil Sedaka or the Supremes or, you know, the hits. There was another record store called Butch Diamond Music.

And Butch Diamond and his brother Saul, they catered, to the black community in Palm Springs. So if you wanted to buy Bobby Blue Blound or Blues Records, John Lee Hooker, you go to Butch Diamond Music. Or there was a third record store. It was called Pat Barbera Music, and they would sell the Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra Records. So that was sort of a, it's a little mini picture of music.

in the early 60s. You were saying how your friends were distracted and didn't get the kind of music you enjoyed. Did your parents get that? Were they with the times? You know, my dad loved Nekin-Kole and my mother loved Frank Sinatra. And although today I would tell you that I have a great appreciation for both of those singers, as a kid I didn't. To me, that was my parents' music.

We had a housekeeper, a woman named Susie Johnson, and I remember that she would come in my bedroom, and I had a single by Hank Ballard called Finger Poppin' Time. And I would put that song on, and she would dance around the room, and it made me so happy just that she liked the song, and I liked the song and we were having fun. It's weird when you, especially in this era, it's so different than when you'd go to a store and you'd buy,

you'd have to buy an album, a collection of singles, or you'd buy singles, but you listen to them in a really solitary place. The one thing that's, so you don't see like trending songs. You don't see, oh, this is what everyone in the U.S. is listening to, therefore I should also listen to it. I mean, the closest thing to that, and obviously more substantial in its influence at that time,

was radio. Were you listening to the radio? Yeah, there was a station in Palm Springs called K-D-E-S. I think the D-E-S stood for Desert, and they would play the hits. But for me, it was more about my record collection and learning about artists, you know, discovering

the blues and the first concert I ever went to in my life was a Ray Charles concert and you know you just you learn about somebody like Ray Charles and your whole life changes

right wanting to study literature in college was that because you wanted to write or you wanted to read um you know today things are different in college um

you can major in pop music in college today. When I was in college, if you were a music major, it meant you were a classical musician. And that is something I was not. I was writing songs on my acoustic guitar, but I had just a basic knowledge of the guitar. I never, I couldn't play, you know, a classical guitar. So I majored in literature because I like to write poetry and I like to read

novels. There's a big difference between listening to music and writing music. A lot of people get happy when they're listening to music. A lot of people even can learn how to play songs on guitar. One, who taught you guitar or encouraged that? And two, who taught you to write? Or was that just instinctual? As a high school graduation present, my grandmother bought me a Gibson acoustic guitar. And now, in Palm Springs, I had played in rock bands. Mostly, I was the lead singer. Because my guitar skills weren't really, like, good enough. But I was the lead singer, and we sang songs by the animals and the ginks,

the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles. But I got to Bard College, and I didn't know anybody. And I had this brand-new Gibson guitar. And I also had notebooks full of poetry. And in my solitude, I sat down and I opened a book of poetry and I was playing some chords on the guitar. And I just started to sing one of the poems. And it was like, you know, this amazing light bulb moment in my life where I realized, wow, I'm a songwriter. That's what I am going to be.

And then I was encouraged because, you know, we all like female attention. and I had written poetry and, you know, nobody really wants to read your poems. But all of a sudden, when I was turning these poems into songs and girls would come into my dormitory room and I play them a song I wrote, they'd go, oh, well, that's cool. So I got a lot of encouragement there. But I just, you know, I really feel like I assimilated song structure from all the great singles and records that I had acquired during my childhood and the songs that I sang in rock bands. And I just got it. I just knew I need a verse. I need a pre-chorus. I need a chorus. I need a

chorus. It just came. I didn't even think about it like that. I just instinctively knew how to write a song. When you graduated, there's this time between graduating and you said you moved back to Thermal. Well, Palm Springs. Well, to Palm Springs, but your band's called Billy Thermal at that point. Well, I didn't have a band at that point. Well, I guess my question is from that point to, you know, Linda Ronstak covering your song, that's a hefty amount of time. Yeah.

You know, and on all of us, I have a similar trajectory as far as, like, when my first, like, significant cuts started coming out. and I work with a lot of young writers who feel like they miss the boat and they're 26 or they're 22 and you're like, you're crazy. Like I'm already old and they're 29 or something. I'm like, no, no, just stick with it. You have this long break from college

to when you become a, I guess you classify as a professional songwriter. Right. What happened in that time? What was your life for that, those years? Well, you know, I really was working 10, 12-hour days in the vineyards. And I was writing songs, but looking back, the songs I was writing, they were good. I could play them for you.

There's some I'm quite proud of, but they didn't really sound like hit songs. But I guess when I was in my, I guess around the age 27, 28, I started hearing songs like just what I needed by the cars and one way or another and hanging on the telephone by Blondie, Breakdown by Tom Petty. That's sort of my Sharon of the Nack. And whereas I had written sort of sensitive, more folky kind of songs, all of a sudden I wanted to write rock songs. and I started to write the songs.

And I just, I also was grappling with a lot of anxiety issues just as a person. You know, panic attacks, anxiety attacks. And, you know, I started to think about what's going on with my life. And so the songs that I was writing were pretty intense at the time. And that I realized I needed to form a band. I couldn't just make demos on the acoustic guitar. Your anxiety was based, you think, in feeling, I don't want to project, but trapped in the vineyard

and you wanted to do music? Or was anxiety based on something else? It was more existential, really. It was just as free-floating. I've always had a tendency to have anxiety and anxiety issues. But I think anxiety, often comes from repression. But I think that

it also gave me the capacity to sort of stream of consciousness write song lyrics that were coming from deep in me. And that was an asset. So, you know,

it's no fun having anxiety, but it is fun writing great songs. Totally. So you listen to all those songs and then, you know, you start this, band that's more reflective of that late 70s rock. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was also I was writing that kind of song. I had to have a band to flesh them out. You know, people have demos, but I always am intrigued. You know, now people have an entire recording studio in their computer. Doing a demo any other era than the last 15 years, you had to get studio time, or you'd have to get a tape player and just be well rehearsed. You know, where did these demos get recorded?

And who was like, hey, you know, were you earning enough money to go buy studio time? Or were you earning enough money to buy a tape player? How were you actually recording these demos? Well, the first band I was ever in, and this was in high school, was called The Fables. and there were two brothers in that band. One was called Kurt Patsner, and the other was Greg Patsner. And their father, Gus Patsner, was the head of the music department at Palm Springs High School. So it was a musical family.

And by the late 70s, when I was writing these songs, Greg Patsner had a recording studio in his father's garage. It was a pretty good setup. And I got two musicians, a bass player and a drummer from Santa Ana, and a guitarist from Los Angeles. And at first I was hiring them to play on my sessions. But we just really had great chemistry, and we decided to become a band. So I came up with the name Billy Thermons.

because I thought it was cool, but I thought it was funny. And, you know, the vineyards were in thermal. So we started to play clubs in L.A. At that point, people could also see a band that they like and sign them. You know, it's like they can believe in the music and sign off of the songwriter, the artist that a band is rather than looking at the analytics. I mean, I'm sure some of that also happened, but differently than it is now. You know, back in those days, if you wanted to be discovered as an artist,

it was almost always you were performing live, and A&R guys would show up at the gig, and they would offer you a deal if they thought you were good enough. I was playing at a club in the San Fernando Valley called the Blah Blah Cafe. And that was with Billy Thermal. And Richard Perry was there. And he signed my band to a recording contract.

So that's how I got started. I mean, Planet Records is also, you know, as you were saying, growing up and you listen to Bill Medley and you're listening to, you know, some of this music that ends up, I mean, it's later in Bill's career. But just being a...

Are you talking about Bill's? Medley from the Righteous Brothers? Yeah, it wasn't his, he was later assigned to Planet Records. I don't know if that was after. I don't know. I don't really know. But, I mean, just the idea of what made you excited to sign to Richard Perry? I mean, he seemed to be...

I would have been excited to sign to anybody. I wasn't in a position to like, pick where I wanted to go. First of all, Richard Perry was a very hot producer. You know, he was producing huge hit

singles like Without You by Harry Nilsen and you're so vain by Carly Simon and the Pointer Sisters so you know he had a major buzz and to be courted by him

was very flattering. Yeah totally. You know you then actually record your first or your first albums as an artist at that level. The song that gets to Linda Ronstat becomes

a massive hit. Just tell me about the journey from, okay, I'm signed to Richard Perry, I record this, and then all of a sudden, there's probably no way that when you were writing the song for Billy Thermal, your assumption was going to be that this song

would then be cut by Linda Ronstadt. It came about in quite an interesting way. The guitar player in Billy Thermal, his name was Craig Hall. And Craig's girlfriend was Wendy Waldman. Wendy was quite a successful singer-songwriter, but she also had a gig singing backup for Linda Ronstadt.

So I'm out there in the desert working in the grapes, and Wendy Waldman and Craig Hull are playing Billy Thermal demos for Linda Ronstat. And one day they announced to me, Linda's going to cut, How do I make you? And I thought, I was skeptical because, you know, I was in my late 20s and I thought, geez, this music business has been hard to have success in. Let's see if this really happens, but it really did happen. And it was the first single from her album and really put me on the map.

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join a performing rights organization or PRO. Performance royalties are an essential part of your income. If not, your only income. ASCAP is America's first PRO and the only one that operates on a not-for-profit basis, which means the money they collect goes to their songwriters, composers, and music publishers, not outside investors, not big corporations. And ASCAP supports you in a lot of different ways, even beyond the royalties. They run workshops, panels, and network.

working events all the time. They've got tons of resources on their website to help you learn about the music industry. They've even got a wellness program. I really respect that ASCAP is a true democracy. AsCAP members elect their board of directors and the board is made up of music writers and publishers like you. They've got over 975,000 members, including our guest, Billy Steinberg. You can learn more about joining ASCAP at ASCAP.com and follow at ASCAP on socials. Our good friends at CHAPMetric have all the data you need to power your music career from playlist placements to stream counts to follower demographics and many more.

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and any of the artists and writers on this podcast. Plans start as low as $10 a month. Learn more and get started today at Chartmetric. metric.com. If you've listened to this podcast over the past few years, you know about LAMP. LAMP is Los Angeles Academy for artists and music production

located five blocks from the beach in Santa Monica. They have a state-of-the-art campus featuring a classroom of 45 in real-life students. Common area is a live stage where they host open mics. They have 15 real recording studios. They have

a world-class one-year intensive high-level music program founded by the super producers, our friends, and guests, Stargate. They've been responsible for songs like Firework and What's My Name, Diamonds, Irreplaceable, a ton of hits. Think of Lamp as this nine-month, high-level songwriting camp, featuring world-class mentors from the music business, including Benny Blanco, Circuit, Emily Warren, Neo, Diplo, Stargate, Jimmy Naves,

Kenny Beats, a bunch of our guests, some presidents of publishing companies, major A&R executives, you know, superstar managers like Jay Brown, who has Rihanna, you know, top-rated mixing engineers, vocal producers, lawyers, business managers, all sorts of music professionals featuring on their Wednesday, Thursday workshops. So they're going on their fourth year, and those are just examples of people who might be your mentor if you get accepted to lamp. So if you're interested in being one of the students who learns how to write and produce songs every single day, which is the norm for them,

then you should visit lampmusic.com. That's L-A-A-A-A-M-P-Music.com. And thank you, L-A-A-M-P-Muic. We are fans of yours. It's so crazy because people aspire to do things in sort of the classic trajectory. And what happens is you end up writing music and sort of within the box,

you end up doing things within that are within the rules. You know, the people who are kind of born and raised in the business do things the way that the business does them. They're not grape farmers writing songs that they want to write because they're listening from that perspective and they're trying to create

that song. And so it's, of course, Lyndon Ronset hears it from Not Her A an R person, not from a publisher. She hears it from, you know, somebody's saying, you should check out this song. The song's really good. Like, there's my new band.

And that's just, it just happens so organically. And you can't repeat that in that way, you know. All the successes that happen later, I'm sure each song has their own journey. But it's a crazy phenomenon that ended up becoming, you know, how do I mean? make you becomes it's a top 10 song yeah you know did did you immediately quit your job did you say to your dad like hey I'm done with this I'm going to move to L.A. the Linda Ronstadt song was a top 10 hit in 1980 and I continued working in the vineyards until 1988 and this is after like a virgin and after true colors.

Just because you loved it? You know, it was a family business. I did love it and you know, my father was aging and it was hard to leave it behind. And I felt very capable

of doing both. Yeah, that's wild. How many hours a day were you in the vineyard versus writing or, I mean, famously you wrote some of these songs while working in the vineyards. Well, you know, grape growing is seasonal. You have about six months of the year with a lot of work. You've got two months for the pruning season.

That's in the winter. And then in the spring, you've got the what they call the thinning season. And then in the summer you have the harvest. But between pruning and thinning, And after the harvest, you have months where there's very little happening. And I would take advantage of those months. And I'd spend a lot of time writing songs and coming to Los Angeles and networking. Did people think you were crazy?

Like, didn't some people say, why are you spending so much time doing that? You could be in L.A. writing... Well, you know, some of the people who still remember me as Billy Thermal, they'll say to me, God, you used to bring me these big boxes of grapes. And I don't know, that's just, that was just the path that I traveled. So you went by Billy Thermal.

You didn't go by Billy Steinberg. No, I went by Billy Steinberg, but, you know, some people, when they really become familiar with the band, they just thought of me as Billy Thermal. But I never introduced myself as, hello, I'm Billy Thermal. I was always Billy Steinberg. In 81, you meet Tom Kelly

becomes obviously your main co-writer for the next 10 years or so, maybe even longer. But between that, you have this hit with Linda Ronstadt. There's a solid break between that and like a virgin. There's another four years.

I was getting a lot of album cuts. Right. But they weren't top 10 songs like that. And so I think when your first song out is a single, there's no way that you would assume that any other song after that would, like, why aren't these all singles, right? Well, I never thought that way. I mean, you know, top 10 singles, if you have a career where you have 10 of them,

you're like a major songwriter. So I know that it's not, I wasn't really discouraged. I just felt like the next big hit was right around the corner. And I got there. It didn't seem to take too long. No. I mean, like a virgin is, you know, having what was a big-size hit to launch your career, and then having like a virgin are very different situations.

I mean, you have a song that even in the moment was like, oh, this is, it probably took two months before. is like, oh, this will be an evergreen. This is all everyone talked about. You know, it was, it's the biggest song that, even now when you think of Madonna, it's the song that you think of, you know. When you wrote it,

and not to have you recount stories that people can find, but when you wrote it, you were on the grape farm. Well, when I wrote the lyrics, I was on the grape farm, but when Tom and I wrote the song, We were in Los Angeles in his house, but the idea for the song, you know, it came out of events in my personal life. I was, you know, some people, they like to start a song with a melody, and some people like to start a song with a title.

I always just start, I always start with the lyric, and I always just start writing, and I don't think about it. So I'm probably driving my red Ford pickup truck, and I get the idea, and I stop my truck, and I pull out my notebook, and I write down, I made it through the wilderness. Somehow I made it through. I didn't know how lost I was until I found you. I was beat, incomplete, I'd been had. I was sad and blue, but you made me feel shiny and new, like a virgin. So for me, it was all sequential.

I didn't start with the title like a virgin. I was just writing, and I had shiny and new, and it popped into my head like a virgin. And I remember the moment when I had that thought and thinking, wow, this could really be something, you know. This was exciting. So I got very excited about working on it with Tom. Some people have asked me, one was, you know,

what's the moment when you knew you were a songwriter? And I had had some decent-sized records and even some hits at that point, but there's this voice recording where it's the moment that one of the ideas hit and you can hear the switch. You audibly hear the switch

and just singing, oh, now all of a sudden you just sort of blurt out the idea. And it's like, wow, that's the moment. And for you to have this clear memory of that moment. That's really, you know, I don't know how much I believe in

higher powers and whatnot, but I do think that that is, that's the most divine moment for a songwriter, you know, and to be able to remember that. Because a lot of times you're in the hustle and you're in the studio

so all the days seem the same. But when you're out and about and you're writing down your ideas, you'll never, you remember the location. You know, that's incredible. I feel like there should be a plaque right there. Like, this is where, you know.

Tell me about Tom Kelly. I mean, you guys obviously wrote a lot of songs together that we know and we'll get to some of them. But why is that, why did that relationship work? You worked with other songwriters. I actually had not worked with other songwriters. Oh. I had only written songs by myself. Okay.

So, then why did you start writing with other people? I mean, who says, who should have tried to write? I had the, you pointed out that there was a little gap between how do I make you by Linda Ronstadt and like a virgin. And I, you know, there was a real jolt of excitement having that Linda Ronstad hit. And after the grape harvest in the year 1981, I was in Los Angeles, and I was at a party. The producer, Keith Olson, had a party at his house. Keith Olson, in case you don't know who he is,

he produced the first Fleetwood Mac album that had Buckingham and Knicks on it. And he had also produced the Buckingham Nick's solo album. So he kind of introduced Lindsay and Stevie to Mick and the Mick. McVee's. And Keith also produced the single Jesse's Girl. And he was a good producer. And he had produced a Pat Benatar album. And I had a song on that album, a song called I'm going to follow you. And he produced another song of mine on a Pat Benatar album. And my song was called Precious Time. These were album cuts. And Tom Kelly had a song on the Pat Benatar album. a song that he had written.

So I went to the party at Keith's house and Tom was there and it was just completely random. I met him and I just said oh, do you want to try to write a song together? He's really the first person I ever asked to co-write with and it turns out it was Tom Kelly.

After Like a Virgin and even before True Colors, although maybe had you written True Colors before like a version and come out? Because all these songs start coming out around the same time. How many of these songs were written, you know, a writer of mine a year ago was saying how he, he was like, I'm done with pop writing,

like I want to focus on some other stuff. I just need a break for a minute. And a year later, one of the songs that he had written already at that point had already been mixed, mastered, a year later became a top 10 hit. And it was that lesson of like, you may already be sitting on the hit. You may think that, oh, I need to write a hit.

Well, it's possible you already have the hit. It just hasn't come out yet. How many of these songs were written with Tom in what kind of time span? How many of these, you know, you've True Colors by Cindy Lopper together. Obviously, we can get into that. And, you know, alone by heart.

And these are Eternal Flame. I'll stand by you. All these songs are so emotional for Whitney Hughes. And these are huge, huge. songs, how many of them were written before Like a Virgin came out? Just one. We wrote the song alone before we wrote like a virgin. Got it. That's pretty crazy. So did Hart already, had they already heard alone? No, no. I would say a good four years went, four to five years went by between when we

wrote it and when Hart heard it. When you were demoing songs, were you demoing the songs, or were you actually sending in sheet music at that point? Demos. There was never sheet music. So when you were doing demos, were you doing full demos with a full band when you were sending in like a virgin? Or was it on acoustic guitar? Tom Kelly kind of was a full band.

He was a very gifted musician. And he would program a very basic beat on the Lynn Drum machine. And Tom could play bass. He could play piano. He could play guitar. and he could sing. When I met Tom, he was making a living as a session singer. So even though all our hits were recorded by female artists,

he sang all the demos. We never had to hire singers. Sometimes Bob Carlyle, who was in my band, Billy Thermal, would play guitar on some of our demos. You had a lot of hits with female artists, almost all of the major hits were with female artists. Yeah. Why? I can't really explain why, you know.

I've been asked that question before. Tom Kelly had a very high singing voice, and we often demoed our songs in keys that were more suitable to female artists. that's possibly one explanation, but you know, you could also say, well, like a virgin and I touch myself, obviously were written for females. And I would have to say, not really. I was just writing from my own point of view. And as crazy as that may seem, I wasn't thinking that they were intended for a female artist. I just was trying to write a great song. Yeah.

It's crazy how that works. And I think it's important for our generation to not allow us to be fictional writers. You know, it's, I mean, Dangerous Woman for me was a song where it's like, I'm not a dangerous woman, but I didn't mean I couldn't write that song. And I still feel like that was authentic and it was, it was with love and it wasn't written from it just felt like it feels like it's okay to write songs that if you're a guy it's okay that women cut the song it's okay if you're a woman that you should be able to write songs for guys and it shouldn't be typecast and I think a lot of

times people now feel like that's that's important and I think what's important is that the song is authentic and comes from a good place and is, you know, with respect and love. And I think that, you know, whether it was intended or not, you did it really well. I never thought, in while writing songs, I never thought this song is for a male or a female. And I never thought, well, who do I want to write for? It was always just, let's write a great song. Period. Yeah, I mean, true colors becomes a massive hit also. Totally, you know, what's great is that there's certain songs that are evergreens. We were talking about before how Youngblood just cut like a virgin. I mean, I think a lot of people feel right now that you can't really write Evergreens because a lot of artists don't do covers the same way. Now they're doing a lot of interpolations. There's a lot of, you know, um, uh,

There's a lot inspired by going on, but there aren't a lot of straight covers, and yet something like True Colors is still covered in its original form. Do you have a favorite version of that song? Well, it would be impossible to like a version better than Cindy Lopper's version. I mean, Cindy, you know, you talk about the demo making process. sometimes Tom and I would write songs and we would have the eventual record would come out it would sound exactly like our demo

like a virgin Nile Rogers and Madonna they copied our demo every nuance of it true colors on the other hand Cindy Lopper really turned that song inside out and came up with something very delicate and very poignant and powerful. So hats off to Cindy. She co-produced the record and sang it

and produced it really impeccably. Some artists, I think, are really good curators of their discographies in the way Madonna has been. And some are really good interpreters of existing music or are good songwriters themselves. And Cindy, her performance, performance on so many songs is truly

what an artist, you know, it's a director who looks at a script and can take something written on paper and to make it a movie. She has, she interprets music and performs it in a way that only she could do. Her inflections are weird and her

tone is unique and she just owned it. I mean, also in that era of the beginning of MTV, you know, whether some of these things you can't time up, your career lines up right with the beginning of MTV becoming, you know, the main medium.

And four years into MTV, people start learning how to actually make music videos. And other than, you know, those first videos in MTV are hysterical because no one knew what to do. Yeah. You know, but by the time you get to like Virgin and True Colors and you get into what Cindy Lauper was doing on MTV, it's like, oh, that's what this gender. Those women are archetypes.

They're superheroes. You know, you realize when you look back on your career that there's so many things that there's where luck is involved. You can write a hit song and it can become a hit for sort of a one-hit wonder kind of situation. And it's harder for a song. like that to become evergreen. But Tom and I were very fortunate because our biggest hits were with Madonna, Cindy Lopper, Hart, the Bengals, the pretenders. I mean, Whitney Houston. Whitney Houston.

So emotional. That's right. I forgot. I can't even imagine. I was this morning. I've got pretty good pitch. And I was, I was just, kind of going through just a refresher and I started singing it's so emotion I'm like I think that's the right key because it's always like really hard to sing and then I was listening to it was like I was a half step up from what I thought it was and it's

brutally high how much is Tom Kelly's voice in that key when you know was he singing it? Our demo of so emotional he sings at falsetto yeah and I don't remember what key it was in but what an amazing song

Yeah, I could play you. I have on my phone, I have the demos for all these songs. I could play your little snippets of them at some point. Don't tempt me. Don't do this. I mean, you gave me the vinyl that you have of the demos of a lot of these songs

before we started this, not to jump ahead, but what inspired you to put those together? Because those are the any songwriter who doesn't love demos of hit songs is not a real songwriter. I mean, it's like, those are amazing.

No, listen, I agree with you 100%. There's nothing more exciting to me than hearing, like the Carol King Jerry Gauphin demo for Will You Love Me Tomorrow or to hear the Lieber and Stoller demo for a song or even finding the original version of a song. For example, you might think about the song, A Piece of My Heart by Janice Joplin, but you realize it was recorded before that by Irma Franklin.

And so to hear that original version, it's so exciting. And it's that way with hearing the demos of hits. I love that. I always ask my songwriter, friends. Play me the demo. Let me hear it. Yeah, there's like, there's like a tainted love or something like that by soft cells like sort of what we think of as the new hit. If you grew up in the 80s, that was like, that was the hit. But if you listen to the originally, like, oh, that's cool. That's a cover. Gloria Jones. Yeah. Or, I mean, obviously all there, the Lieber and Solar ones,

there's so many versions of it before you get to, you know, Elvis in the beginning. But when you get to even the, what's it, I can't make you love me. The Bonnie Rait one is up-tempo. You know, and to think of that as up-tempo, you're like, what? How did, how did you leave a Nashville session, a demo

session with that being up-tempo song? And then somebody heard it, it was like, oh, well, let's slow it down and let's do it. And it becomes one of the greatest songs of all time because the decision of I can't, here's my tidbit for up-and-coming writers is

like if it's a cheesy uptempo song, make it a ballad. And if it's a ballad and it's really cheesy, put double-time drums under and all of a sudden it sounds like you've got a vibe. Like both of those things are great techniques in reimagining demos. Speaking of great ballads, Eternal Flame is a huge ballad, but you start writing. with an artist in the room, which is different than alone and true colors and like a virgin, you know, so emotional. Those are straight up. Those are pitch songs that are cut.

It's different when you write with an artist in the room. Why did that work so well? How did that not mess up the chemistry between you and Tom? Well, you know, when you're a songwriter and you're writing songs to get covered, You don't like to be limited by the fact that you can only pitch your songs to artists who don't write their own songs. Because that's sometimes a short list. And, you know, we loved the bangles, we loved the pretenders, we loved the divinels. And it was clear that if we want to write songs for those acts, we're going to have to write them with Susanna Hoffs or with Chrissy Hind.

or with the divinels. So we, the first one, the first one we did was Eternal Flame was Susanna Hoffs. And, you know, it was, the Bengals essentially were a 60s retro band. And it became very naturally for us to just try to put on our beetle hats and try to write a song. It's interesting. I mean, you think of, I mean, you had a few. hits with them, or a couple hits with them, but you had some records with these guys where to try to explain what the Bengals were now, first of all, there just aren't as many girl groups

as there should be currently. These were women who could all play. Santa Hoffs was such an incredible writer and character. And it was just this era where you had bands that had identity. So when you go in and work with them, at least from my perspective, they seem to have an identity. Maybe when she was in the room with you, she didn't have that established yet. But of all the people who seemed to have identity, they were as, you know, they seemed to have an idea of what they wanted to sound like. Well, the Bengals, it was an interesting situation. And I think in some ways it was lamentable. Because if you think about the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger,

was the lead singer. And if you think about the doors, Jim Morrison was the lead singer. And the members of the Rolling Stones and the doors, they didn't begrudge Mick that role. They were like, hey, we've got this guy that is exciting to watch

and we can have longevity, a career because of these great lead singers. But with the Bengals, there was always competition in that band. All the girls were, wanted to be lead singers. I should say a woman. All the women in the band wanted to be lead singers.

And they never really identified Susanna as the lead singer. And I think that's why the band broke up is because, you know, they sort of had a quota on if they were going to release an album, Susanna was going to sing 25% of the songs. And so was Vicky and Debbie and Mickey. and they were all talented women, musicians, writers, but I just think if they had embraced the idea that Susanna was the most photogenic

and had the most recognizable voice, they could have gone further. They could have stayed together instead of breaking up. Did you write with the other women? Or did they each have their own? They all had their own, they all had their own writing partners. It's funny how that works.

I mean, their bands are still like that a little bit. Maybe you still have a lead senior, but there are a lot of bands where they split up who writes what, when, and the ego that's attached to it is real. And if the band, either the band splits the publishing equally amongst themselves, which probably keeps the band together,

but then you better have the main co-writer who's inevitably writing the most, has got to be really altruistic with sharing, you know, the fact that their songs are the ones that are getting cut or their songs are the hits. And I just don't see how being in a band works, period, in this era, but that seems to be a common story. Yeah, I agree with you on that. Did you start thinking it was easy? I mean, at that point, you had not just, you know, take like the Pretender's song, you know, when, you start thinking it was easy. I mean, in the, at that point, you've had not just, you know,

when you have I'll Stand By You Huge song Beautiful song Are you just assuming that Like you were saying The Hick kind of would come around the corner From 1980 to 1984

And then all of a sudden You have this string of just But you know There was There was adversity involved You know For example With Eternal Flame

When we first wrote that and Susanna presented it to the band. The band didn't like it. So there was a lot of behind-the-scenes fighting going on with is it going to go on the record and the producer lobbying for it. And even with All Stand By You, you know, Chrissy knew it was going to go on her record,

but she also felt like, hey, the pretenders, we're like a hard-ass biker chick. kind of image is I'll stand by you a little safe for the pretenders. So, you know, there's no, in neither case was it really a done deal that these songs were going to be on the records, let alone become huge hits. That's so crazy. Through the 80s, there's obviously all these hits. I think we should, you know, going into the 90s, you

end up with, you know, I feel like we should talk about Tina Turner. You worked with Tina, Tina just passed away. What was your, did you have any interaction with her? I think a lot of songwriters, a lot of people assume songwriters interact with the artists that cut their songs. That's not always the case. So I didn't know, but did you have any interaction with Tina? Tom and I went to Roger Davies' house, and Roger was Tina's manager. And we met with Tina, she cut a song of ours called Look Me in the Heart. It was sort of an AC kind of hit, but it wasn't one of our bigger hits, but I don't really remember the content of what we discussed, but it was an exciting moment just meeting with Tina and knowing she was going to record our song. Before we

jump to other co-writers and other hits, I think, Before we leave the Steinberg-Kelly catalog behind, I think it's important to mention both I drove all night and I touch myself, because those are my two personal favorites. I mean, Roy Orbison was my mom's favorite growing up, so, you know, obviously that's a big song. But that song also was recorded by a few people, right? Both Cindy Lopper, Roy Orbison, and Celine Dion, I'll cut it.

And it was just so crazy. Why do you want to discuss both those songs? I mean, I'd love to discuss both those songs, but why did those two feel? Well, I feel really proud of those songs, and I think they're important in the Steinberg-Kelly catalog of songs. They feel those are so different. I mean, they're wildly different from each other. Yeah.

You talked a little bit about the I Touched Myself. That's one of those songs. It's like if like a virgin defined Madonna, that song, you know, I feel like that's the kind of song where as a songwriter I was too young to be like, oh, I'm going to be a songwriter at that point. But I imagine a lot of people are like, you're not allowed to say that. I knew we wrote a great song, but I really doubted whether radio would play it. Yeah. And I was pleasantly surprised when radio embraced, I touched myself and played it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a fun record. Do you listen to, you know, you still hear a lot of your songs out and about. I hear a lot of your songs out and about. Do you actively listen to songs that, you know, that you released in the past? Do you ever have days you're just, I just want to listen to my, you know. I don't so much listen to the songs. Sometimes I'll listen to the demos just for fun. or sometimes like Celine Dion cut, I drove all night.

And if I just go on YouTube, because as a songwriter, you know, if you write a hit song, you'd never really get access to how much the general public loves it. And so for me, if I put on YouTube, I drove all night, Celine Dion, and you see a huge venue in some place like Rio de Janeiro or something. And she's on stage and she's singing. I drove all night and you see all the candles or lights coming on. You get a little, as a songwriter, you get a little glimpse into what your song is done. As songwriters, you know, we don't, we don't.

taste that, you know? I just had my second song with Celine out two weeks ago and because she has a movie out called Love Again and it's sort of the single off that

or one of the singles off it. Congratulations. Oh, thanks. But, you know, I've had a couple of her last, one on her last album and one on this album and she's obviously, she's, you know, once in a generation talent. But you end up

falling into you in 1996, which was the album, the title track of the album, and it's an album that sells just such an insane amount of copies. And you're talking about like more than 20

million worldwide. It's so hard to fathom that in general right now because people just don't consume music that way. And even if it was happening a little bit in the beginning of my career, I didn't see it like that. Those are crazy numbers that even if it was, it's not the biggest hit that you had. It was still a hit, but it wasn't the biggest hit, and it still was consumed by so many people.

It's one of my favorite songs. You also were a producer on it. Yeah. So there's this, you're making a switch at this point a little bit. I mean, maybe you were, you got producing on some of the other stuff, but this is a different situation. I wrote Falling Into You with Marie Claire DuBaldo and Rick Knowles, and Rick and I co-produced it. Rick and I had been friends for a long time before we wrote any songs together. And, you know, I did produce songs with Rick Knowles.

and with Josh Alexander, but really it was their generosity to include me because Rick could have produced falling into you by himself, but I got included as a producer because I'm sure I contributed to the production overall, but I'm more of a songwriter than a producer. Nobody, I think, is going to hire me to produce their record by myself. I'm just not that.

I don't really have that skill set. Well, I'm happy that you won a Grammy for that for a couple reasons. I mean, obviously one of the things that we've pushed forward in the last few years is to make sure songwriters get a Grammy for album of the year because their contribution is such a part of the production and the recording of it, certainly in this era when people are writing and recording often in the same day. And I feel like you getting production,

credit at that point is appropriate as it would be appropriate today. And I think you earned that by your contribution in the song and whatever you did in the studio. Sure, Rick could have done it by himself. Shout out Rick, also a Hall of Famer. You know, but I just, I feel like, I feel like that you were ahead of your time with that. As a lyric. as a lyric falling into you is one of my personal favorites.

I think it's one of my best. Why? Well, I'll just tell you a couple lines, for example, that I like. It's very romantic. I wrote that song as I was falling in love with my wife, Trina, and it says, I feel my unconscious merge with yours, and I hear a voice say,

what's his is hers I'm falling into you I think those are beautiful lines it says catch me don't let me drop love me don't ever stop and I think that idea

I think is powerful you know when you give yourself into loving somebody it's scary and I think the song expresses a lot of the deepest feelings about falling in love Are you still getting better as a songwriter?

No. I mean, you know, you go from through the night, that's fair, where is the, what's the arc? Because obviously in the 2000s, you also have hits, you know. I mean, this is 10 years after falling into you and there are a lot of songs in between. So, you know, just, just because obviously we don't have all day. But going to too little too late for Jojo at that time, which becomes, you know, another new co-writer situation. It's a huge moment for, you know, you could have retired.

Yeah. But you didn't. No, I, you know, I'll tell you an interesting story. And we all have this experience, I'm sure you do. Once you've succeeded in the music business, there's always people saying, my cousin writes songs, my nephew writes songs, My neighbor writes songs.

Will you listen to them? And, you know, I always think, well, of course I will. I want to listen and I want to be available to help up-and-coming people in any way I can. But most of the time, you hear something that is either incredibly bad or you hear something that's just okay. Well, in this case, my uncle in San Francisco, he said, a friend of mine's son is a songwriter, and he's like 19 years old. His name's Josh Alexander.

Would you listen to some of his songs? And I said, of course I would. And Josh had just moved from Marin County, where he grew up to Los Angeles. And he came over to my studio. And he played me some of his songs. I thought he was super talented. And that was really the only time I ever met somebody in that kind of will you listen to such and such way and had it turn out into being a successful endeavor. It worked out great for Josh and it worked out great for me. Yeah, I really like Josh. Shout out to him as well.

You guys also had Give It Heart a Break, which sort of is the first really big hit for Demi Lovato. And so one thing to be a part of, somebody's legacy where you come in towards the end of their career. It's another thing when you do like a virgin, True Colors, these songs that really define an artist. I mean, I guess Cindy Lover had some stuff before. That's sort of Madonna, but those really are defining songs.

Obviously, the Jojo song is, that's her opus. For Demi to be sort of part of the beginning of her journey as well, well, do you find it more inspiring to be part of the beginning of somebody's career, or is it better to reinvigorate somebody's career who's already had their moment? Man, I just want a hit song. Yeah. Just going back in time, you asked me that question, I remember Clive Davis called me on the telephone,

and he said, God, Billy, people are sending me ballads and ballads. and ballads for Whitney. I'm desperate for an up-tempo song. And Tom and I wrote so emotional. So when you're a songwriter, I don't think we can pick and choose, do I want to write a song that starts an artist's career? Do I want to write a song for an established artist?

You just want to write a hit song. Because, man, it's a big deal to write a hit song. But, you know, for me, of course, they take extra pleasure in knowing that, okay, I wrote the title track for True Colors album and for the Like a Virgin album and falling into you as a title track. There's a special pleasure in being,

you know, having a special thing like that happen. You never signed a publishing deal, you said. No. My guess is that there were a lot of publishers who would have loved to have signed Billy Steinberg. Well, you know, the thing is I had a big chip on my shoulder. Why? Because when I was working in the great business, I would get into my pickup truck,

and I would drive two and a half hours to Los Angeles, and I'd have a meeting with a publisher or an A&R person. And they were so rude, so rude. They'd keep me waiting in the waiting room. finally I'd get a chance to go into the meeting. In those days, it was probably a cassette. They'd put my cassette in their cassette player and start playing the song. And then their assistant or the receptionist would call them.

So they'd press pause on my song. And then they'd fast forward to the next song. And I always felt so dismissed that it just built up in me. this chip on my shoulder. And so by the time, and I was earning a reasonably good salary working in farming, so I wasn't desperate for an advance. So by the time

I had a hit with Linda Ronstadt and then like a virgin with Madonna, it was hard for me to see the benefit in signing a publishing deal. I just felt like fuck you guys. Now, having said that. I do think publishers can be very helpful to writers. And there would have been advantages to have signed a publishing deal. Publishers can arrange collaborations. And publishers have

relationships with ANR people. And I never really, in my whole career, had a close relationship with a publisher who could do something to help me. Mostly, it was me or me and my co-writer scrambling to get our songs out there. No. Rick, I believe, had a publisher. I don't even remember. Yeah, Josh had a publisher, Billy Steinberg. Oh.

Fair enough. Yeah, I think that people wait. for leverage for a publishing deal or a record deal. I think they can often be waiting a long time and when they could use the services of a publisher in whatever capacity that may be, whether it's from a co-writing perspective, a guidance perspective, whatever it is.

Often a new writer could use any of the relationships that a legitimate publisher can offer to help their career. if you're in a position where things are really rolling, maybe you don't need to do a publishing deal. And in this era, you can do admin deals where they may give you some sort of publishing services. Well, admin deals, I find, are not really that great

because, yes, as a songwriter, you're saving a lot of money because the admin percentage they're taking is small. But because they're getting such a small percentage, they're not really motivated to do anything for you. Right. So, like, I'll just tell you a little anecdote, the story about you asked who was, did Josh Alexander have a publisher? Well, so I met Josh Alexander because his father was a friend of my uncles.

And Josh came over and I liked what he was writing and I thought, God, I'm going to help this guy get a publishing deal. And I called people at Warner Chapel and Universal and Sony. and I had, I arranged meetings for Josh with these publishers. And, you know, he didn't have a cut. He didn't have any money in the pipeline. And they all would say, oh, yeah, he's good, but nobody was offering him a deal. And it just out of, I didn't want to be anyone's publisher,

but just out of frustration, I just said, I'll publish you, Josh, I'll do it. And much to my surprise, we ended up co-writing together. And it was very gratifying and very satisfying. Yeah, it can be, it's one of my favorite parts of my day is that I can talk to songwriters that are hustling in a different way. They're writing in a different way. They're writing with different artists than I would write with.

They're, you know, and you, if you have a manageable number of writers, you can learn a lot about them and composition. You learn from teaching often. So there's a lot of benefits to being a publisher as well. It's interesting, though, not having done it when we met, I was talking to you and Diane Warren, she never did a publishing deal either. Well, she did.

She did? I thought she didn't. She had a publishing deal and she got out of it early in her career. Yeah, but she did have one. Yeah, that's interesting. Because I remember she and I were represented by the same law firm, and I remember when she was wriggling out of her publishing deal. And, yeah.

In this next segment, we're going to do five for five. I'm just going to list five things and just tell me what comes off the top of your head. No rules. Okay. Okay. Number one, grapes. Grapes. Well, people always ask me.

They always say, you must know a lot about wine. and I say, no, I don't know anything about wine. I don't drink wine. We grew table grapes. So I have to always explain that. The grapes that I know about were the grapes that you buy to eat, not the wine grapes. Were they red or green? Both.

What happened to the farm? You know, as my father grew older and because I left the business, he sold it. Do you miss it? I do miss it. I do miss it. It was a great part of my life. Yeah.

It was a great part of your life. See? It was. See, by the way, I never really asked follow-up questions. I'm just so intrigued by this. It's fascinating. Okay. Rick Knowles.

Rick Knowles. Rick is a phenomenal musician. You know, he has a feel on the acoustic guitar that's exceptional. I always admire when somebody can pick up an acoustic guitar and really make it sing. And he has that ability. And Rick is also a, you know, he's just very motivated guy.

I mean, he's a little younger than I am, but he's going full speed ahead, having created numerous albums worth of material with Lana Del Rey. And he's a great, you know, he's like a great divining rod for artists. He helps artists define their careers with his ability as a co-writer. Tom Kelly. Tom Kelly just had a very special melodic gift. And Tom Kelly and I had an amazing rapport.

You know, when we met, Tom was from Indiana, and I was from California. I'm kind of the neurotic Jew and Tom's more even keeled. We were very different, but we found that we loved the same music. We both loved Laura Niro and we loved obviously the Beatles, but Roy Orbison and Smokey Robinson, we had so much common ground. And I had the most fun in my life was writing with Tom. We would always write at his house.

And I'm so gung-ho. Every day when we'd finish, we'd say, well, what time do you want to start tomorrow? And we'd agree, okay, one o'clock. And the last thing he'd say would be, don't be early because I'm always early and Tom would always

as soon as I'd get there I'd have some idea and I'd say let's go and he'd go come on and we'd go sit in his kitchen and have a cup of noodles and he'd say look I'm surrounding the moment so we had but it was it's a great memory you know when you write songs like true colors and like a virgin

with somebody, it's hard not, as it goes into the past, it becomes part of your youth. You can't, those are golden moments, you know. So Tom Kelly, for me, it's just, those were magic years. The Songwriter Hall of Fame. The Songwriters Hall of Fame, obviously I'm delighted to be in it. I don't really understand the organization. I don't really feel, I don't really know what it is, you know. I don't have necessary, you know, I told you about having a chip on my shoulder.

That chip is a little bit, you know, with the songwriter's Hall of Fame. I don't know if they really, I don't really understand what they are. And I'm glad I'm in it. Yeah, but what, the chip do you feel like you, I remember a publisher coming up to me. I played at this NMPA event a few years ago, and I had to play three songs that were hits, and a publisher came up to me who was really a dick to me

when I was hustling. Yeah. Like trying to get in. He's like, I hope I wasn't offensive to you. Which, kudos to him for, like, labeling what I clearly, what he clearly was a dick. Yeah. And he clearly felt like he should have.

acknowledge the fact that I probably should have been nicer to you at that time. Do you feel like the chip is a little lighter because you were inducted in the Hall of Fame? Or do you feel like because publishers and writers are part of the Hall of Fame that it's still there? I just think, I don't know, it's very hard for me to answer that question. Okay. I just, I don't know. I'm glad I'm in the Songwriters' Hall of Fame, and I'm appreciative that I was inducted.

I don't know what else to say. Very good. Trina. My wife? Yeah. Well, Trina's been an inspiration for some of my best songs. Falling into you, I'll stand by you. Those are a couple of songs that she inspired.

And, you know, when I would write a new song, she'd be the first one to hear it. And it's great to have somebody to bounce a song off of. Did she ever ever have ideas that made the songs better? Not so much, no. But she was, you know, I could always gauge from her reaction whether this was just a pretty good one or a special one. Yeah, we all need that.

And I think that's overlooked how essential that actually is to a songwriter's journey is a good partnership in some capacity or good partnerships, whatever they look like, but someone you can bounce songs off of, because you even hear them differently when you have someone to play them for. Absolutely. So you can't overestimate the importance of good partnership.

But thank you for doing this podcast. I have a lot of respect for your career and it was great meeting you at a Songwriter Hall of Fame event at the Grammy Museum and then having us get an opportunity to chat like this. We're all in your shadows of the people who were before us in this business and we're continuing to try to help lift the next generation

as you did with Josh and as I hope I'm doing with writers. And we just are learning from the best. So thank you for being one of the best. Thank you for calling me one of the best and for inviting me to participate. I'm delighted to have done it. There you go. This episode is produced by Joe London,

mega house management, and myself. See you all next week. I'm Ross Golan signing off.