![]() Our main reason for meeting with Michael was because Tom and I were still clinging to the idea of making another record. I started submitting it to a&r people and our first responses to it were, 'Are you kidding me? No one's going to sing a song called "Like a Virgin."' Somebody said, the song is catchy, but why don't you change the title? But we stayed with what we had.Įventually Tom and I had a meeting with Michael Ostin, (Warner Brothers Records President) Mo Ostin's son, who was an a&r man at Warner Brothers. Tom sang it falsetto and it really put the song across. So we finished the song together and then made a really good demo. That's it.' He was just clowning around, but I said, that's perfect. ![]() So when he started singing falsetto a la Smokey Robinson, I went 'That's it. He was known for having this Foreigner type of high rock voice and the first things we'd written together had all utilized that instrument. One day, out of frustration, Tom started playing the bass line for 'Like a Virgin' using his left hand and singing in a Motown style falsetto. So we put that lyric aside and started to write something else, but eventually I kept pushing that lyric because I felt it was something special. But when he got to the chorus it just sounded ridiculous singing 'like a virgin' in a sensitive ballad sort of way. When I put that lyric in front of Tom, who was sitting at his keyboard, he tried to write a ballad to it. I succeeded in doing so and met somebody new and I wrote the lyrics: 'I made it through the wilderness/somehow I made it through/didn't know how lost I was/ till 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.' Tom and I had become very close friends and he knew in my personal life I had been trying to extricate myself from a very difficult relationship. I got together with Tom and I showed him the lyrics. In 1983 after I-Ten was gone, we wrote a new batch of pop songs and one of them was 'Like a Virgin.' I probably wrote the lyrics to it sitting in a pickup truck on the vineyard in the Coachella Valley. Because we wrote as if we were writing them for ourselves as artists. And because we took that approach, I think that's why the best songs we wrote are enduring. We were just writing songs for the love of it. We weren't thinking about who was in the studio. We weren't thinking of what was currently in vogue. ![]() When we wrote we just tried to write songs we liked. As often as possible I would come up to LA or he would come down to the Coachella Valley, where I lived. Tom was making a living doing background vocal sessions, while I was working for my dad in the vineyards. We continued to write maybe two weekends a month. But that record didn't meet with any success. One thing that was a bit of a distraction was that we got signed as artists to Epic records. ![]() But we didn't write any hits for a couple of years. Right away we realized we had a certain ability to write together. Tom had written "Fire and Ice" for the same album. Tom did a little checking on me, and when he found out I'd written "How Do I Make You" he decided it would be worth his while, because he'd liked that song. I had never done much co-writing, but I suggested to Tom that we try writing together. Billy Steinberg: I met Tom Kelly in August of '81 at a party given by producer Keith Olsen, who had recorded two of my songs with Pat Benatar. But if not for his massive breakthrough a few years later with "Like a Virgin," co-written by Tom Kelly, he might still be in his father's grape business. When Linda Ronstadt covered " How Do I Make You" from the band Billy Thermal's only album in 1981 and turned it into a Top 10 hit, all of a sudden its author, the band's leader Billy Steinberg, became a viable songwriter at the age of 30. ![]()
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