Billy Steinberg, a lyricist and Grammy Award-winning producer whose skill at writing from a female perspective led to hit recordings by leading female singers like Madonna, Whitney Houston and Cyndi Lauper, as well as the rock band the Bangles, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 75.
His son Ezra, also a songwriter, said the cause was cancer.
With the musician Tom Kelly, Mr. Steinberg wrote hundreds of songs over two decades. Five rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the 1980s, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Heart’s “Alone,” Ms. Houston’s “So Emotional,” Ms. Lauper’s “True Colors” and the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” (co-written by the band member Susanna Hoffs).
“Like a Virgin” drew on Mr. Steinberg’s joy in a new romantic relationship after a painful breakup. “As soon as I wrote it, I knew I had something very quirky and special,” he wrote on his website in 2004. “I like playing with words, and I realized that the word ‘virgin’ would be edgy and provocative.”
He and Mr. Kelly initially conceived the song as a ballad. But when Mr. Kelly sang the lines, “Like a virgin/Touched for the very first time,” in that style, he found that the tune just didn’t land.
“No matter how he sang those words,” Mr. Steinberg recalled, “they sounded ridiculous.”
When Mr. Kelly added a Motown bass line and sang in a falsetto, mimicking Smokey Robinson, something clicked.
“I probably sang for at least a minute without stopping,” Mr. Kelly told Billboard after Mr. Steinberg’s death. “We both looked at each other wide-eyed, and Billy’s going, ‘That’s a hit,’ and I’m going, ‘It is. You’re right!’”
They shopped the song for a year until Michael Ostin of Warner Bros. Records told them that it fit Madonna’s risqué image. After its release in late 1984, “Like a Virgin” spent six weeks atop the Billboard chart. It was her first No. 1 Billboard hit.
Despite their contribution to Madonna’s early success, Mr. Steinberg and Mr. Kelly did not meet her until they were introduced at a party at her manager’s house several years later.
“I said, ‘Madonna, I’ve wanted to meet you for so long,’” he recalled in an interview last year on the “Songs You Know With Toby Gad” podcast.
“And she just said, ‘Well, now you did,’ and walked away,” he said.
“What matters most,” he added, “is that it was a megahit.”
Mr. Steinberg nearly always wrote songs before they were matched to an entertainer, but “So Emotional” came at the request of Clive Davis, the influential producer and president of Arista Records. He asked Mr. Steinberg and Mr. Kelly to write an up-tempo song for Ms. Houston.
“He said, ‘Listen guys, all I get for Whitney are ballads; I’ve got ballads coming out of my ears,’” Mr. Steinberg said in the “Songs You Know” interview.
Mr. Steinberg and Mr. Kelly — who were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2011 — also collaborated with Chrissie Hynde of the rock band the Pretenders.
They wrote five songs for the band’s 1994 album “Last of the Independents,” including “I’ll Stand by You.” Mr. Steinberg had written some of the lyrics before meeting Ms. Hynde and refined them with her input.
“Billy found it easy to work with her,” Mr. Kelly said in a telephone interview. “We collaborated with a lot of artists, but she was the best, the real deal.”
“I’ll Stand By You” opens with Ms. Hynde singing:
Oh, why you look so sad?
Tears are in your eyes
Come on and come to me now
Don’t be ashamed to cry
Let me see you through
’Cause I’ve seen the dark side too
William Endfield Steinberg was born on Feb. 26, 1950, in Fresno, Calif., and grew up mostly in Palm Springs. His father, Lionel, was a prominent grape grower in the Coachella Valley and an early ally of the United Farm Workers union leader Cesar Chavez. His mother, Louise (Endfield) Steinberg, managed the home.
Billy became enraptured with pop music by listening to records at a neighbor’s house in Fresno, a fascination that only accelerated as he built up his collection of 45s in Palm Springs. “The Beatles were a huge inspiration to him,” Ezra Steinberg said in an interview.
He studied literature at Bard College, in Annandale-on Hudson, N.Y., and wrote songs that he sang on campus, accompanying himself on a Gibson acoustic guitar that had been a gift from his grandmother.
In 1971, he left Bard after his junior year because of anxiety attacks, returned to Palm Springs, began to see a psychoanalyst and worked on his father’s vineyards. Inspired by the music of Elvis Costello, Blondie and the Cars, he wrote rock songs and formed a band, Billy Thermal, in the late 1970s; Thermal was the town were his father’s vineyard was.
The band was signed by Planet Records in 1979, but its only album was never released. Still, two of the songs were recorded by Pat Benatar, including “Precious Time.” Another of his songs, “How Do I Make You,” which was not on the album, was recorded by Linda Ronstadt in 1980 and peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
At a party the next year, Mr. Steinberg met Mr. Kelly, who was then a guitarist and recording studio backup singer. “He dragged me into the basement of the house and sang me a song,” Mr. Kelly remembered. “I wasn’t blown away, but I noticed how good his lyrics were, that they were clever and catchy.”
Quickly, he added, “We became a machine. It was a bit of an explosion.”
Their other hits included the Bangles’ “In Your Room,” also written with Ms. Hoffs, in 1988; Ms. Lauper’s “I Drove All Night,” in 1989; the Divinyls’s “I Touch Myself,” in 1991, written with the band members Chrissy Amphlett and Mark McEntee.
Mr. Steinberg worked with two other collaborators: Rick Nowels, with whom he won a Grammy for producing “Falling Into You,” the title song from Celine Dion’s 1996 album, which also won for best album and best pop album; and Josh Alexander, with whom he wrote “Give Your Heart a Break,” a No. 16 Billboard hit in 2012 for Demi Lovato.
Mr. Steinberg said he did not intentionally write for women but had a knack for understanding love from a female viewpoint. “I just write stuff that pops out of my head,” he told Scott R. Benarde for the 2003 book “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories.” “I guess I’m in touch with my feminine side. I enjoy cooking. I collect beads, and I write pretty good songs for women.”
In addition to his son Ezra, Mr. Steinberg is survived by his wife, Trina McKillen Steinberg; another son, Max; two stepchildren, Raul and Carolina Cruz; and two sisters, Barbara Steinberg and Mary Pichey. His first two marriages ended in divorce.
After Mr. Kelly prevailed on Mr. Steinberg to rewrite some of his original lyrics to “True Colors,” Ms. Lauper recorded it in 1986. Ms. Lauper changed the approach, from the original gospel style, and added a new introductory lick.
Ms. Lauper acknowledged after Mr. Steinberg’s death that some of the back and forth with her on the song had been “hard for him.” But in a statement to Billboard, she recalled him saying that she had created her own “very exquisitely beautiful version” of the song. “That really meant a lot to me,” she said.
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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