But back in 1983, they still had those pop star dreams they couldn’t quite let go, so Steinberg and Kelly formed a band called I-Ten. Their songs were recorded over the last three decades by Pat Benatar, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Whitney Houston, the Bangles, and the Divinyls. They scored a ton of hits, for other people, primarily women - they had an uncanny knack for writing songs from a female point of view.
Soon thereafter, Steinberg met session and backing musician Tom Kelly, and they started writing together. Steinberg had a pop band in the late 70s called Billy Thermal, with whom he recorded his composition ”How Do I Make You,” far better known for being sung later on by Linda Ronstadt. Or the duo of Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly. Linda Perry or Richard Marx, for example.
The people who end up becoming the top pop songwriters often end up in that position because their days as pop performers never came or ended too early. If you don’t have an account yet, you can request an invitation (they issue them pretty promptly now). If you’ve got a Spotify account, you can listen to most of the originals here, and the cover versions here. Next week, we’ll publish a separate “honorable mention” post featuring some of the songs that didn’t earn enough votes to make the list, but were important enough to individual authors that we wanted to make sure they received some attention as well. Those top 100 lists were weighted on a curve and used to generate the list that you see below. We created a huge list (800+ songs) of nominees, and each of the authors that participated selected their own top 100. The process for generating our list was fairly simple. You can hear and recognize the glory of the original version in every note of the cover, but the listening experience is taken to another level through the talents of the covering artist. But the finest of these, the ones we love the best, are simply great songs by great artists where the addition of a new twist and a new voice creates something that is greater than the sum of its parts. And some of them, whether by generational ignorance or through the general obscurity of the original artist, simply didn’t receive the exposure they needed for their greatness to be recognized until they were delivered by a more familiar voice. For others, the genius of the original song was always present but the presentation was lacking, and when the talents of a different performer are added, the song gains a gravity that it didn’t have in its original form. Some of the songs below are great because they completely deconstruct the original, stripping it down to its most basic components of chords and lyrics, and build it back up again in a completely different style. But what exactly are the ingredients for a great cover? It’s generally agreed upon that if you don’t have any new flavor to add to the original, you shouldn’t bother doing a cover.
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