Neil Sedaka

Neil Sedaka built two separate phases of mainstream popularity as a vocalist, composer, and pianist, first riding the wave of adolescent pop in the final years of the 1950s and the opening stretch of the 1960s before returning with a more seasoned brand of pop and rock during the 1970s. A pianist schooled in classical technique, he supplied the melodies for his own successes—most often paired with lyricist Howard Greenfield—while delivering them in a youthful tenor. Even during stretches when his own singles failed to crack the upper reaches of the charts, he kept writing material for fellow performers, producing a steady stream of hits across decades whether performed by himself or others. Eight of his compositions reached the U.S. pop Top Ten, among them the number-one smashes “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Laughter in the Rain,” and “Bad Blood.” Captain & Tennille scored their own chart-topping version of another Sedaka-Greenfield song, “Love Will Keep Us Together,” and hundreds of pop, rock, country, R&B, and jazz artists eventually cut his material, among them ABBA, the Carpenters, Cher, Patsy Cline, Rosemary Clooney, Sheryl Crow, Bobby Darin, Neil Diamond, Gloria Estefan, Tom Jones, Carole King, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, the Monkees, Wilson Pickett, and Elvis Presley.

As a child Sedaka showed early promise at the keyboard, once chosen by Arthur Rubinstein to appear on a New York classical radio broadcast, and he later trained at the city’s renowned Juilliard school. Concurrently he immersed himself in rock and roll and doo-wop by joining an early incarnation of the Tokens. After achieving his initial songwriting breakthrough in 1958 when Connie Francis recorded “Stupid Cupid,” he signed a solo contract with RCA. The resulting hits were skillfully assembled yet ranked among the gentlest entries from the early Brill Building cohort; his comparatively slight, elevated voice was reinforced through multi-tracking, still an uncommon device in that era.

Sedaka’s run of major hits dried up roughly a year before the Beatles arrived in America. For the following decade he concentrated chiefly on supplying songs to other acts, still collaborating with Greenfield and landing scattered successes. An unforeseen resurgence arrived in Britain in the early 1970s, where three of his albums were co-produced by Graham Gouldman of 10cc. By the middle of the decade he was recording for Elton John’s Rocket label and reached number one with the ballad “Laughter in the Rain” in 1974. That single, together with “Love Will Keep Us Together,” helped revive middle-of-the-road pop. Another chart-topper, “Bad Blood,” followed in 1975, featuring background vocals from Elton John. A slower reworking of “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” climbed into the Top Ten the next year. Although Sedaka never returned to the Top 40 after 1980, he maintained steady bookings on the adult-contemporary circuit.

By the mid-1980s his era of multi-platinum sales had ended, yet the accumulated catalog allowed him to headline theaters and hotel casinos across the United States and abroad for decades afterward. He continued releasing new material and fresh interpretations of earlier work. Following the 1986 death of Howard Greenfield from AIDS, Sedaka issued the double-album My Friend, spotlighting the pair’s most familiar compositions. In 1991 Polydor’s Timeless: The Very Best of Neil Sedaka reached the U.K. Top Ten. Varèse Sarabande’s 1995 anthology Tuneweaver found him revisiting many signature songs, while Classically Sedaka appeared the same year on Vision, recasting classical motifs with fresh lyrics written by Sedaka himself. Tales of Love and Other Passions, recorded with a jazz trio, surfaced in 1997. A television-advertised collection, The Very Best of Neil Sedaka, charted in Britain in 1999.

His first substantial project of the 2000s was Brighton Beach Memories: Neil Sedaka Sings Yiddish, issued by Sameach in 2003; that same year he independently released The Show Goes On, an album of new songs for which he composed both music and lyrics. Early in 2010 came The Music of My Life, pairing another batch of original material with a disc of greatest hits. As the decade advanced, Sedaka remained a regular presence in the U.K., where he made his home and where most of his albums—reissues included—were issued first. Among them was The Real Neil, containing new compositions alongside updated versions of older tracks.