Neil Sedaka

“When I was a teenager, I used to buy 45-rpm singles and scratch out the artist’s name on the label and write my name in, just to see how it would look,” says Neil Sedaka. “I wanted success very badly.”

Just when is youthful chutzpah and brazen bravado justified? When you’ve got the goods.

“Actually, that was probably my only real aggressive side – my music,” Sedaka explains. “Once I discovered I could write songs, it’s something I’ve always taken very seriously.”

This dedication to craft – and his prodigious natural talent – has made Sedaka a seminal figure in American popular music: as a hitmaking artist whose recordings have visited the upper reaches of the Billboard charts in four separate decades, and as a songwriter whose compositions have just as frequently propelled numerous other artists to the same destination. The Brooklyn boy celebrates his fiftieth anniversary in the business in 2007, and every one of those years has been marked by significant work and accomplishment. If he wanted it badly, Sedaka has surely earned his success.

Most people assume he began his career with “Oh! Carol” and the string of infectious rock ’n’ roll hits it inaugurated in 1959. Which is true enough. But the ambitious writer-singer had already been in the trenches well before then, combining his performing ability (he’d been admitted as a piano major to Manhattan’s Juilliard School of Music) with his unbounded love for the then-new sounds of doowop percolating through the streets of New York. He was just 13 when he began writing songs with his lyricist neighbor, Howard Greenfield, in 1952. As the city grew into the international headquarters of rock ’n’ roll, the pair routinely shopped their songs to music publishers, ultimately clicking in 1958 when American Bandstand heartthrob Connie Francis delivered a major hit with their “Stupid Cupid.”

The two teenagers placed their songs with a variety of early-rock and R&B acts, but from the start Sedaka was also intent on establishing himself as an artist. A pair of one-off singles for small labels failed to ignite, but by early 1959 he made it into the national Top 15 with his first RCA Records charter, the powerful ballad “The Diary.” A hot streak of remarkable consistency and diversity commenced; for the next five years Neil Sedaka singles were a constant presence on the Hot 100. He notched his first Number One single in 1962, with “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” the irresistibly melodic pop-rocker that he would take back to the Top 10 more than a decade later. The disc had been preceded by such period-defining rockers as “Stairway to Heaven,” “Calendar Girl” (both 1960), “Little Devil,” “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen” (both 1961) and “Next Door To An Angel” (1962), as well as the torchy ballad “You Mean Everything to Me” (1960), the vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding “King of Clowns” (1962) and the gutsy New Orleans romp “Sweet Little You” (1961).

Sedaka reigned as a first-tier pop star with the likes of Bobby Darin, Dion, Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and the Everly Brothers. And, like theirs, his run slowed in 1964, when the Beatles and the British Invasion swept most of pop’s previous kings from the pantheon. Unlike some of his compatriots, Sedaka continued to enjoy real, venue-filling stardom internationally. He not only toured relentlessly in the U.K. and Europe, Japan and South America, but recorded his music in Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese, enabling him to have numerous hits outside the home country.

What may have been obscured to the general public by Sedaka’s absence from the domestic pop charts – and what sustained his music-biz career and ultimately returned him to even greater success in the 1970s – was his continuing work as a songwriter. Throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s, he and Greenfield contributed material to such artists as R&B legends LaVern Baker and Clyde McPhatter, country star Patsy Cline, Bobby Darin, teen idol Jimmy Clanton and, most notably, Connie Francis, whose Top-10 singles “Frankie” and “Where the Boys Are” came from their piano and pen. Sedaka prospered even more in the later ’60s and early ’70s, his tunes being cut by the Fifth Dimension (the Top-20 item “Workin’ on a Groovy Thing” and “Puppet Man,” which Tom Jones also scored a hit with), the Monkees (“When Love Comes Knockin’ at Your Door”), Frankie Valli, Cher, Peggy Lee and the animated Harlem Globetrotters (“Rainy Day Bells,” which has since become a vocal-group classic).

Considering the variety of artists for whom he’s written, Sedaka has displayed a range of composing skills that’s easily the equal of Goffin-King, Bacharach-David or any of his Brill Building contemporaries. “It’s more difficult to do something fresh and exciting when you’ve written a thousand songs,” he admits, “but you’d better do something that excites you or it’s boring for the listener. I’m always inspired by other musicians, as I think creative people bounce off each other that way.” Though Sedaka continued to collaborate with Greenfield and subsequently wrote with Phil Cody and Carole Bayer, as well as writing his own words and music fore the last 30 years.

It was, in fact, the move toward a more personal, autobiographical style of writing of the early-’70s singer-songwriter movement that launched the second great phase of Sedaka’s career. During the period, he relocated to England and began releasing albums like 1972’s Solitaire. The album’s austere and moving title ballad, a hit for the Carpenters in 1975 and more recently for American Idol star Clay Aiken, served notice of Sedaka’s abiding (and maturing) talent. So did the much-covered “Love Will Keep Us Together,” with which the Captain & Tennille stormed the top of the charts in 1975. The duo also recorded his “Lonely Night (Angel Face)” and “You’ve Never Done It Like That” to much success. (Close listeners will hear Tennille sing “Sedaka is back” on the fadeout of “Love Will Keep Us Together.”)

The year 1974 marked Sedaka’s official comeback as a recording artist, and few returns to stardom have been as impressive. It was abetted by his new friend, Elton John, then at a career peak and seeking to branch out business-wise. John signed Sedaka to his fledgling Rocket Records imprint and issued the presciently tagged Sedaka’s Back album. The set combined tracks from the Solitaire LP with new recordings, among them the fresh and still contemporary-sounding “Laughter in the Rain,” which gave Sedaka his first chart-topper since “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” “It was like a dream come true,” he recalls of the song’s warm worldwide reception. “It’s sort of in my Aaron Copland writing style. I knew there had to be a drop-dead chord in the middle, and I had to find it. When we started to work on it, I walked into the studio [in Los Angeles], and the musicians weren’t so happy about working with an old rock ’n’ roller, so I got lousy session guys at first. But then word spread around about what we were doing, and finally I got James Taylor’s rhythm section – Russ Kunkel, Danny Kortchmar, Leland Sklar – and it was magic from the word go.”

As had happened earlier in the wake of “Oh! Carol,” the magic sparked by “Laughter in the Rain” unleashed a downpour of hits. The touching and tuneful “The Immigrant,” written as a gesture of support for John Lennon during his visa fight with the U.S. Immigration Department, was a Top-30 single in 1975, as was “That’s When the Music Takes Me.” Bigger still was “Bad Blood,” Sedaka’s second Number One disc in less than a year (it held down the spot for three weeks), which featured Elton John on backing vocals and David Foster on electric piano. Another abrupt left turn stylistically, the track, Sedaka notes with pride, “got me a great compliment. James Brown stopped me a few years ago and said, ‘You know, you’re in my territory now with “Bad Blood.”’ I thought that was great.”

Sedaka trumped himself with his next record. “The singer Lenny Welch,” he recalls, “had a hit with [the 1963 ballad] ‘Since I Fell for You,’ and he had asked me if I had a song for him. I was playing around at the piano and discovered that ‘Breaking Up Is Hard to Do’ worked as a slow, gin-mill song. I played it for him, he had an R&B hit with it, and I put it in my act as an encore.” Thirteen years after its initial uptempo success, the ballad version of the tune became Sedaka’s next smash; it was, like “Bad Blood,” from 1975’s The Hungry Years album. It was followed by “Love in the Shadows” and “Steppin’ Out,” both from 1976’s Steppin’ Out set, “Amarillo” in 1977 and, in 1980, “Should’ve Never Let You Go,” his poignant duet with daughter Dara.

Sedaka calls that one “delicious. It wasn’t a question of a father pushing his daughter. This is just a beautiful, 16-year-old voice. I had done the song solo on the album All You Need Is the Music, and we were at a party in the Hamptons and I asked Dara to sing with me, just spontaneously. Everyone said, ‘Record that with your daughter!,’ and we did.”

Since then, Sedaka has continued to show the world he’s got the goods in abundance, producing diverse and accomplished work. His 1980 album In the Pocket yielded the soul-inflected “Junkie for Your Love” (“probably the funkiest thing I ever recorded”), 1997’s Tales of Love and Other Passions found him working the after-hours jazz groove with a trio, and 2003’s Brighton Beach Memories: Neil Sedaka Sings Yiddish, took him back to his ethnic-neighborhood roots. The DVD The Show Goes On - Live At The Royal Albert Hall documented a recent sold-out performance at London’s prestigious concert hall, and now there’s the Razor & Tie anthology, The Definitive Neil Sedaka.

Definitive is the operative word. This compilation corrals material from every phase of Neil Sedaka’s remarkable music-making, from the captivating froth of “Calendar Girl” and “Stairway to Heaven” through the brooding “Solitaire” to the biting “Bad Blood” and beyond. Especially noteworthy is the inclusion of later-period Sedaka gems and a handful of rarities, of which he’s equally proud (“I call them ‘my forgotten children’”). Among them is the previously unreleased demo of “It Hurts to Be in Love”; Sedaka’s track, minus his original vocal, became a hit for Gene Pitney in 1964. As portraits of artists go, The Definitive Neil Sedaka is an accurate and remarkably impressive representation.