Neil Sedaka obituary

"Prolific hardly does justice to Neil Sedaka's songwriting output, which ran to more than 1,000 compositions over seven decades. If he had been willing to stay behind the scenes, turning out tunes for other singers, he would have still merited a place in pop history thanks to the number of those songs that became part of the pop canon, including Where the Boys Are, Love Will Keep Us Together and (Is This the Way to) Amarillo."

"However, Sedaka, who has died aged 86, had a constitutional need to see his own name in lights. As a star in his own right, he contributed another half-dozen significant tunes to America's pop songbook, the best known being Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Bad Blood and Laughter in the Rain."

"Never hip, and overlooked by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame which greatly rankled; he felt he deserved to be inducted he was nonetheless a first-class song-and-piano man, surpassed by few of his generation."

Neil Sedaka, who died at 86, was a prolific composer of over 1,000 songs spanning seven decades. While he could have achieved historical significance solely as a songwriter for other artists—with compositions like Where the Boys Are and Love Will Keep Us Together becoming pop standards—Sedaka insisted on performing his own work. As a performer, he added significant hits including Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Bad Blood, and Laughter in the Rain to America's pop songbook. Despite his first-class musicianship and piano skills, he remained overlooked by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a slight that deeply bothered him. Born in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, to immigrant parents, Sedaka grew up in a working-class Jewish household where his mother dominated his life well into his twenties.

Read at www.theguardian.com