How we wrote Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’ by Billy Steinberg

Billy Steinberg: “A lot of people just said, ‘You’re going to have to change that title, you can’t be serious’”

Revealing the controversially-titled co-write with Tom Kelly that went on to become one of the best-loved songs of the 1980s

By 1983, with artists like Linda Ronstadt and Pat Benatar recording his compositions, Billy Steinberg’s songwriting career was well underway. The Californian had also started a steady writing partnership with Tom Kelly, with whom he’d go on to create a string of top hits. This year memorably brought Steinberg a fortuitous moment of lyrical inspiration that would become the source of he and Kelly’s first huge break.

Following the breaking off of a negative relationship, Steinberg met someone with whom a new love began to blossom. While revelling in this experience, song lyrics entered Steinberg’s mind, which encapsulated his feelings of renewal and joy in this fresh start. He and Kelly then collaborated to create a Motown-inspired sound, with Kelly lending falsetto vocals for the song’s demo. After facing initial rejections in finding an artist to take on the track, Madonna’s recording of Like A Virgin, along with her 1984 VMAs performance of the song, led to international success as it reached No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it remained for six weeks. Like A Virgin has been named as one of “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll” by The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and remains one of the most indelible music releases of the 1980s.

Article first published in Songwriting Magazine Summer 2021

Released: 31 October 1984
Artist: Madonna
Label: Sire, Warner Bros
Songwriters: Tom Kelly, Billy Steinberg
Producer: Nile Rodgers
UK Chart Position: 3
US Chart Position: 1

“I always wrote my song lyrics in a sort of a stream of consciousness. I know some people search for titles in newspaper articles or they start a song with the title, I’m not really that way. I just get out my pen and my pad of paper and I just start writing. Sometimes it comes out like a poem and sometimes it comes out like a song. And a lot of times it reflects what I’m going through in my life, but I don’t really think about it, it’s more of an unconscious stream.

“So at that time, I had a new girlfriend and I had recently extricated myself from a very difficult relationship. And so I just started writing, rather without thinking about it, I just wrote, ‘I made it through the wilderness / somehow I made it through / I didn’t know how lost I was until 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.’

“So the title really came out of the ‘shiny and new.’ ‘Shiny and new, like a virgin,’ I don’t know, it just popped out. So I also thought as soon as I wrote that, ‘Wow, this is a cool song lyric.’ I could read that and recognize that there was a certain spark there, that this had tremendous potential. So that was in 1983. And then when I got together with Tom, I placed that typed lyric on his keyboard and I said, ‘Let’s write this song.’

“I had no melody in mind at all. For Tom and me, we spent a lot of time writing that song because, with a lyric like that, you’ve got to find the right approach [or] it doesn’t sound right at all. So it took some experimentation.

Tom Kelly (left) and Billy Steinberg

“Tom was knowledgeable about my personal life and the issues I’d been going through, and he started to read it from the top, which was that very sincere story about making it through the wilderness and being beat and incomplete. He read that and he was more focused on that than he was on the title. So he started playing it sort of like a ballad. And I kept saying ‘That’s not going to work, Tom,’ because I knew that ‘like a virgin’ was not going to sing very well as a ballad.

“Tom and I had been writing rock songs. We had already written the song Alone, the one that was a hit for Heart. Now, it was a hit after Like A Virgin, but still we had already written it. So Alone would have been relatively typical of the style we had been writing in. It was like rock music. But Tom and I both were big fans of Motown and Smokey Robinson and Al Green, and so out of just frustration, Tom started to fool around playing a bass line that sounded something like I Can’t Help Myself or Billie Jean, and he started singing falsetto. And I just said, ‘That is it right there, that’s Like A Virgin,’ and he just was taken aback because Tom was quite well-known as a singer in Los Angeles. He was a session singer, and he was known for this powerful high-range rock voice. And he had never exposed this falsetto-type singing in the music industry, so he was a little like, ‘You mean you want me to actually commit to this falsetto singing kind of thing?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’ So we made a very simple but very effective demo. And I sang some background vocals and Tom sang the lead falsetto. And we completed the demo of Like A Virgin.

“A lot of people just said, ‘You’re going to have to change that title, you can’t be serious.’ I was an admirer of Smokey Robinson, and he had written a song once called Virgin Man. Not that that’s related in any way to Like A Virgin, but the word had been in a song. I remembered how I felt when I wrote the lyric, that it had authenticity. That it wasn’t a gimmick. That it came out of a real-life experience and that it was sincere. And I knew that we had written some great music to it, so…I wasn’t swayed by the initial reaction.

“I just thought, ‘I’m not going to change the title. That’s the whole core of the thing.’ So it did take a while. Fortunately for us, there was a new artist called Madonna who was perfect for that song.

“Tom and I had a common ground musically. We were very different as people, but we loved the same music: The Beatles, Roy Orbison, Smokey Robinson, Motown, Al Green, we had all these artists that we both loved, and I loved [Bob] Dylan and he loved The Beach Boys. And we would channel all those influences when we were writing songs. And there was a period of time there, probably about a 10-year period where it just felt like anything that we wrote could be a big hit”

You can find out more about Steinberg’s career and current projects at billysteinberg.com

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