Songwriters Hall of FameInducted 1983 | BMI Writer

Neil Sedaka was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 13, 1939. He was a piano prodigy as a child and later attended the Julliard School of Music.

In 1956, he was seleceted by Arthur Rubenstein to perform on New York City’s classical music station, WQXR. However, prior to that, at the age of 13, he had met and befriended Howard Greenfield. Both lived in the same apartment building in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach section. They didn't know of each other's existence until Greenfield's mother had a chance meeting with the young Sedaka in a Catskills Mountain resort. Suggesting to the juvenile pianist that "You should meet my son; he writes great lyrics," Mrs. Greenfield arranged the meeting (in the same apartment complex) and what was to become the most productive and successful team from the Brill Building was formed.

Soon, Greenfield, the budding poet, and Sedaka, the 13-year-old piano student at the Juilliard School, had become a team, and established a regimen of writing a song a day, a routine they continued for nearly two years. At the same time, they began making the rounds together in Broadway's Brill Building, one of several major centers for writers and producers of pop music. During one of their music publisher visits, they met what was to become another brilliant songwriting duo of the era, Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus, who steered them to another office in another music business center known as 1650 Broadway, where a new publishing company was just being formed by the veteran music man, Al Nevins, and his younger partner, Don Kirshner.

Hearing some of the…

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