Hello and welcome to this the flagship edition of the soda jerker on songwriting podcast my name's Brian O'Connor and alongside me is my good friend and musical

collaborator Simon Barber hello Simon hello. Thanks for joining us.

Simon and I are a songwriting team hailing from Liverpool England, a city with a rich

musical heritage of its own. Cy would you like to talk a little bit about how the podcast came to be?

Well, one of the things we've always been really interested in is how things get made.

So any time we can see behind the scenes of film or music or comedy or whatever it might be.

We're always really fascinated to find out how artists have approached their work.

So what we wanted to do then was to create a program where we could talk a little bit about the experiences that we've been having as songwriters

and also talk to some well-known practitioners. So we'll be having conversations with

successful songwriters and trying to find out from them how they've

approached their craft.

So we really hope you enjoyed the podcast and please feel free to give us your feedback. back. our first ever guest on the podcast. It's Grammy Award winner and recent

inductee into the songwriting hall of fame Billy Steinberg. Now some of you may

not be familiar with the name, but if you've even the most cursory interest in pop music you'll almost certainly be familiar with his quite extraordinary body of work.

I mean, sigh, his list of credits is pretty damn impressive.

It certainly is.

Billy Steinberg has written or co-written five number one hits on the

billboard charts I think that's correct we're going to be talking to him about

songs such as like a virgin by Madonna true colors by Sindhiper, Eternal Flame by the Bangles, I drove all night by Roy Orbison,

I'll stand by you, by the pretenders, the list just goes on and on, I mean the guy has got mad skills.

He ain't playing. He is the real deal and we're

very very lucky to have him on the show absolutely I think Billy's that rare

...