Neil Sedaka
Neil Sedaka is an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Since his music career began in 1957, he has sold millions of records worldwide and has written or co-written over 500 songs for himself and other artists, collaborating mostly with lyricists Howard "Howie" Greenfield and Phil Cody.
After a short-lived tenure as a founding member of the doo-wop group the Tokens, Sedaka achieved a string of hit singles over the late 1950s and early 1960s, including "Oh! Carol", "Calendar Girl", "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" and "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do". His popularity declined by the mid-1960s, but was revived in the mid-1970s, solidified by the 1975 US Billboard Hot 100 number ones "Laughter in the Rain" and "Bad Blood". Sedaka maintained a successful career as a songwriter, penning hits for other artists including "Stupid Cupid", " Amarillo" and "Love Will Keep Us Together". He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983 and continues to perform, mounting mini-concerts on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Early life: Juilliard and the Brill Building
Sedaka was born in Brooklyn. His father, Mordechai "Mac" Sedaka, was a taxi driver of Lebanese Jewish descent. Sedaka's paternal grandparents came to the United States from Istanbul in 1910. Sedaka's mother, Eleanor, was an Ashkenazi Jew of Polish and Russian descent. He grew up in Brighton Beach.Sedaka demonstrated musical aptitude in his second-grade choral class and, when his teacher sent a note home suggesting he take piano lessons, his mother took a part-time job in an Abraham & Straus department store for six months to pay for a second-hand upright piano. In 1947, he auditioned successfully for a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music's Preparatory Division for Children, which he attended on Saturdays. His mother had wanted him to become a classical pianist like his contemporary Van Cliburn, and Sedaka continued to show fondness for classical music throughout his life.
At the same time, to his mother's dismay, Sedaka was discovering pop music; his mother eventually acquiesced when Sedaka received a five-figure royalty check for his hit "Calendar Girl" in 1961. When Sedaka was 13, a neighbor heard him playing and introduced him to her 16-year-old son, Howard Greenfield, an aspiring poet and lyricist. They became two of the Brill Building's composers.
Sedaka and Greenfield wrote songs together throughout much of their young lives. Before rock and roll became popular, Sedaka and Greenfield found inspiration from show tunes. When Sedaka became a major teen pop star, the pair continued writing hits for Sedaka and numerous other artists. When the Beatles and the British Invasion took American music in a different direction, Sedaka was left without a recording career. In the early 1970s, he decided a major change in his life was necessary and moved his family to the United Kingdom. Sedaka and Greenfield mutually agreed to end their partnership with "Our Last Song Together". Sedaka began a new composing partnership with lyricist Phil Cody.
Career
Rise to fame with RCA Victor: the late 1950s
After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School, Sedaka and some of his classmates formed a band called the Linc-Tones. The band had minor regional hits with songs like "While I Dream", "I Love My Baby", "Come Back, Joe", and "Don't Go", before Sedaka launched his solo career and left the group in 1957. The Linc-Tones, later renamed the Tokens near the end of Sedaka's tenure with the group, went on to have four top-40 hits of their own without Sedaka. Sedaka's first three solo singles, "Laura Lee", "Ring-a-Rockin'", and "Oh, Delilah!" failed to become hits, but they demonstrated his ability to perform as a solo singer, so RCA Victor signed him to a recording contract.His first single for RCA Victor, "The Diary", was inspired by Connie Francis, one of Sedaka and Greenfield's most important clients, while the three were taking a temporary break during their idea-making for a new song. Francis was writing in her diary, Sedaka asked if he could read it, and Connie said no. After Little Anthony and the Imperials passed on the song, Sedaka recorded it himself, and his debut single hit the Top 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 14 in 1958.
His second single, a novelty tune titled "I Go Ape", just missed the Top 40, peaking at No. 42, but it became a more successful single in the United Kingdom with a No. 9. The third single, "Crying My Heart Out for You", was a commercial failure, missing the Hot 100 entirely, peaking at No. 111 but reaching No. 6 on the pop charts in Italy. RCA Victor had lost money on "I Go Ape" and "Crying My Heart Out For You" and was ready to drop Sedaka from their label; Sedaka feared he was headed for one-hit wonder status. Sedaka and his manager, Al Nevins, persuaded the RCA executives to give him one more chance.
Sedaka then bought the three biggest hit singles of the time and listened to them repeatedly, studying the song structure, chord progressions, lyrics and harmonies before writing his next songs. "Oh! Carol" delivered Sedaka his first domestic Top 10 hit, reaching No. 9 on the Hot 100 in 1959 and going to No. 1 on the Italian pop charts in 1960, giving Sedaka his first No. 1 ranking. In the UK, the song spent a total of 17 weeks in the top 40, peaking at No. 3. In addition, the B-side, "One Way Ticket", reached No. 1 on the pop charts in Japan. Sedaka had dated Carole King when he was still at high school, which gave him the idea to use her name in the song. Gerry Goffin—King's husband—took the tune and wrote the playful response "Oh! Neil", which King recorded and released as an unsuccessful single the same year. Thus, this was the only time the melody of the song was used by a popular artist and a future sensation around the same time.
Big hits in the early 1960s
After establishing himself in 1958, Sedaka wrote many more hits from 1960 to 1962. His flow of Top 30 hits during this period included: "Stairway to Heaven" ; "You Mean Everything to Me" ; "Run, Samson, Run" ; "Calendar Girl" ; "Little Devil" ; "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" ; his signature song, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" ; and "Next Door to an Angel". For several of those songs, Sedaka was paired with Stan Applebaum and His Orchestra. Singles not making the Top 30 during this period included "Sweet Little You" and "King of Clowns". RCA Victor issued four LPs of his works in the United States and Great Britain during this period, and also produced Scopitone and Cinebox videos of "Calendar Girl" in 1961, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" in 1962, and "The Dreamer" in 1963. His second LP was an album mostly of old standards. He made regular appearances on such TV programs as American Bandstand and Shindig! during this period.Writing for other performers
Connie Francis
When Sedaka was not recording his own songs, he and Howard Greenfield were writing for other performers, most notably in their earliest days Connie Francis. Francis began searching for a new hit after her 1958 single "Who's Sorry Now?". She was introduced to Sedaka and Greenfield, who played for her every ballad they had written. Francis began writing in her diary while the two played the last of their songs. After they finished, Francis told them they wrote beautiful ballads but that they were too intellectual for the young generation. Greenfield suggested that they play a song they had written for the Shepherd Sisters. Sedaka protested that Francis would be insulted by being played such a puerile song, but Greenfield reminded him Francis had not accepted their other suggestions and they had nothing to lose. After Sedaka played "Stupid Cupid", Francis told them they had just played her new hit. Francis' rendition of the song reached No. 14 on the Billboard charts, while it topped the UK Singles Chart.While Francis was writing in her diary, Sedaka asked her if he could read what she had written. Francis said no. This inspired Sedaka to write "The Diary", his own first hit single. Sedaka and Greenfield wrote many of Connie Francis' hits, such as "Fallin'" and the "Theme from Where the Boys Are", the film in which she starred. This hit the Top 5 on the Billboard pop singles chart and Francis had several No. 1 singles. "Where the Boys Are" eventually became her signature song.
Jimmy Clanton
Sedaka and Greenfield also wrote some of Jimmy Clanton's hits, such as "Another Sleepless Night", "What Am I Gonna Do?" and "All the Words in the World". Sedaka himself recorded each of these three songs: "Another Sleepless Night" appears on his Rock With Sedaka debut album; "What Am I Gonna Do?" was the B-side of "Going Home to Mary Lou" and appeared on his 1961 album Neil Sedaka Sings "Little Devil" and His Other Hits; and "All the Words in the World" was recorded but was kept in the RCA Victor vaults until 1977, at the height of Sedaka's return to popularity, when it was released on the album Neil Sedaka: The '50s and '60s.Session work
Sedaka also contributed some work as a session pianist during his heyday as a pop singer-songwriter. His piano playing is heard on "Dream Lover", Bobby Darin's 1959 hit.Foreign-language recordings
Sedaka was very popular in Italy. Many of his English-language records were released there and proved quite successful, especially "Crying My Heart Out for You" and "Oh! Carol".In 1961, Sedaka began to record some of his hits in Italian, starting with "Esagerata" and "Un giorno inutile", local versions of "Little Devil" and "I Must Be Dreaming", respectively. Other recordings followed, such as "Tu non lo sai", "Il re dei pagliacci", "I tuoi capricci", and "La terza luna". "La terza luna" reached No. 1 on the Italian pop charts in April 1963. Cinebox videos exist for "La terza luna" and "I tuoi capricci". Sedaka's Italian diction was impressive; his recordings in Italian had very little American accent. RCA Victor's Italiana branch distributed his records in Italy and released three compilation LPs of Sedaka's Italian recordings.
Sedaka also recorded an album in Yiddish, several songs in Spanish including "Mi Vecinita", a handful of songs in German, and one single apiece in Hebrew, Japanese, and French. His English-language recordings were also quite popular internationally; "One-Way Ticket to the Blues" and "Calendar Girl" reached No. 1 on the Japanese pop charts in 1959 and 1961. He also enjoyed popularity in Latin America for his Spanish-language recordings. Many of these were pressed onto 78 rpm discs.
Sedaka stated in 2020 that he was talked into focusing on the international markets because Elvis Presley, the biggest rock star in America, never toured overseas, and because his publishers and managers considered it a much lower risk for a new performer not to face American audiences who knew him.