Neil Sedaka, the singer-songwriter behind dozens of hits of the 1960s and '70s, dies at age 86

NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Sedaka, the hit-making singer-songwriter whose boyish soprano and bright melodies made him a top act in the early years of rock ‘n' roll and led to a second run of success in the 1970s, has died.

Sedaka, whose hits included “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Laughter in the Rain,” died Friday at age 86.

“Our family is devastated by the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and grandfather, Neil Sedaka,” his family said in a statement. “A true rock and roll legend, an inspiration to millions, but most importantly, at least to those of us who were lucky enough to know him, an incredible human being who will be deeply missed.”

No other details of his death were immediately available.

A key member of the Brill Building songwriting factory, Sedaka teamed with lyricist and boyhood neighbor Howard Greenfield on songs that reflected the teen innocence of the post-Elvis, pre-Beatles era of the late 1950 and early 1960s, including “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” “Calendar Girl” and “Oh! Carol,” a lament for his high school sweetheart, Carole King.

After a long dry spell, he reemerged with such smashes as “Laughter in the Rain” and “Bad Blood.” The Captain & Tennille's cover of his “Love Will Keep Us Together” was a chart-topper in 1975.

Short and dark-haired, with a big smile and high-pitched voice, he was a Juilliard-trained, Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish taxi driver who began performing as a teen and kept at it for decades.

Sedaka still played dozens of concerts a year well into his 80s. He retained the enthusiasm and broad vocal range of his youth and never tired of the standards he had sung hundreds of times.

“Past 70, Pavarotti told me the vocal cords are not what they used to be. I’m very fortunate that my voice has held,” he told The Associated Press in 2012. “It’s nice to be a legend, but it’s better to be a working legend.”

Sedaka’s songs sold millions worldwide and have been covered by a range of performers, from Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra to The 5th Dimension and Nickelback. Sedaka helped propel the career of Connie Francis with “Stupid Cupid” and “Where the Boys Are,” the latter for the soundtrack of the movie with the same name. The Captain & Tennille received a best-album Grammy thanks largely to “Love Will Keep Us Together” and included a nod to Sedaka at the end of the song, when Toni Tennille exclaimed “Sedaka’s back!”

Sedaka grew up in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood, pampered by his grandparents, aunts and mother in a two-bedroom apartment he shared with 11 relatives. He has a street there named in his honor, Neil Sedaka Way.

But his music compensated for his unpopularity as a kid, he once recalled. His talent was recognized by a second-grade teacher who urged his homemaker mother, Eleanor, to buy him a piano. She went to work in a department store to pay for a secondhand upright and managed his career for years, as did his wife, Leba.

Sedaka loved songwriting and never quit, but he craved performing.

“Once a performer, always a performer. It’s that adrenaline rush. It’s like a natural high when you’re in front of an audience, and if you get that standing ovation, it’s infectious,” he told the AP.

At 16, Sedaka was chosen by Arthur Rubenstein in a contest as the city’s best high school piano student and performed on a classical radio station as a prize. It was the same year he discovered rock ‘n’ roll, when he performed a song, “Mr. Moon,” he had written with Greenfield, his classmate at Abraham Lincoln High School.

“I sang it in the auditorium for a ballyhoo show and I remember there was a bit of a riot. The kids were jumping and screaming,” Sedaka said. “After that I was able to go into the sweet shop with the tough kids with the leather jackets.”

After high school, and then Julliard, Sedaka and Greenfield were signed to Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music, where they scored their first hit with Francis, “Stupid Cupid.”

In 1958, at age 19, Sedaka signed with RCA Victor Records and his first single, “The Diary,” enjoyed modest success. He began touring and promoting his songs through regular TV appearances on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” and “Shindig!”

At the Brill Building, Sedaka and Greenfield were joined by other up-and-coming writers and lyricists including King, Neil Diamond and Paul Simon.

From 1959 to 1962, Sedaka had 10 records in the Top 10, including “Calendar Girl,” “Oh! Carol,” “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen” and “Next Door to an Angel.” But in the mid-1960s, the Brill Building sound, influenced by the doo-wop groups of the New York City streets, was pushed off the charts by the Beatles -led British Invasion and the psychedelic and protest music that followed. Sedaka would endure 13 years “in the wilderness,” as he described it to the AP.

Sedaka was among the lucky, however, enjoying a renaissance that began in the mid-’70s thanks to the patronage of Elton John, whom he met at a party after Sedaka moved his wife and two kids to England to take advantage of his lingering popularity there. John signed him to his fledgling, U.S.-based Rocket Records label, providing him a chance at more hits with the album “Sedaka’s Back.”

At Rocket, Sedaka and a new writing partner, Philip Cody, topped charts with “Bad Blood” and the joyous “Laughter in the Rain.” He also achieved a rare feat with “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” His original up-tempo version went No. 1 in 1962. He rerecorded it as a slow ballad in 1975 and that, too, went No. 1.

He recorded five albums from 1972 to 1976. They included hits “Standing on the Inside,” “That’s Where the Music Takes Me” and “Our Last Song Together,” about his breakup with Greenfield, with whom he began writing songs when Sedaka was only 13 and Greenfield 16.

He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, but the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame eluded him despite a fan petition drive.

Sedaka married wife Leba in 1962. They had two children. Daughter Dara recorded a duet with dad in 1980, “Should’ve Never Let You Go.” It was a hit, but she never joined him in the music business. Son Marc is a film and television writer.

AP Entertainment Writers Mark Kennedy in New York and Andrew Dalton in Los Angeles contributed. Leanne Italie, the principal writer of this story, retired in January.

FILE - Composer Neil Sedaka, and his wife, Leba Sedaka, attend the New York City Ballet's gala opening night of Paul McCartney's "Ocean's Kingdom" on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011 in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini, File)

FILE - Neil Sedaka poses for a portrait in New York, Monday, April 30, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes, File)

FILE - Singer and song writer Neil Sedaka appears on the NBC "Today" television show in New York Thursday Oct. 25, 2007. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

FILE - Recording artist Neil Sedaka poses for a portrait Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2010 in New York. (AP Photo/Jeff Christensen, File)

ATLANTA (AP) — The father of an accused Georgia school shooter testified in his own defense Friday that he gave his son a rifle as a Christmas present in hopes of bonding with the boy over hunting and outings at the gun range.

In one of the latest cases in which parents are being put on trial after their children are accused in fatal shootings, defense lawyers called Colin Gray to the witness stand. Prosecutors say he should be held accountable for giving his son the weapon despite alleged threats and warning signs that the boy was mentally unstable.

His son, Colt Gray, was 14 at the time of the Sept. 4, 2024, shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, northeast of Atlanta. He faces 55 counts, including murder, in the deaths of four people and 25 counts of aggravated assault. He’s accused of carefully planning the attack that killed two teachers and two students and wounded several others.

The father faces 29 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter.

The trial of Colin Gray, now ending its second week, has included testimony from the boy's mother, Marcee Gray, who testified that she urged her husband to lock up the guns so that their son could not access them. But in the days before the school shooting, their son kept the gun in his bedroom, witnesses testified at the father's trial.

The parents were separated for much of the time leading up to the shooting, and Marcee Gray was not charged with any crimes.

Colin Gray became emotional Friday after being asked by his lawyer whether there were any “red flags” that would have made him believe his son was capable of a school shooting.

“No, I struggle with it every day,” he said, trying to hold back tears.

“He’s a good kid,” Gray added. “He wasn’t perfect, and nor was I. But to do something that heinous, like I don’t know of anybody that can ever see that kind of evil. Like the Colt I knew and the relationship I had — there’s this whole other side of Colt I didn’t know existed.”

In a sometimes combative cross-examination, a prosecutor hammered Gray on details he left out of conversations with social workers and others who were checking up on his children. Multiple times, Gray responded that he was struggling while “learning on the fly being a single parent working full time just trying to get my feet under me.”

Even today, he said, he doesn't remember everything in the years leading up to the shooting.

“I’m trying to still process what exactly happened with my son, and me being locked up for it, so if I did not remember every single detail that you are asking me at that point, that is my bad," he testified.

After being asked about his efforts to get his son into therapy, Gray said “that’s not the only thing I had to worry about while I had those kids.”

Gray took the stand a day after prosecutors showed surveillance video of the morning of the shooting. The video shows his son getting on a school bus with a backpack that prosecutors contend carried the rifle. The weapon protruded from the backpack, and poster board was used to conceal it, prosecutors have said.

In the video, he is seen entering the school with the backpack. He walks down several hallways past dozens of students and some employees who don’t take notice of the large size of the pack. He then begins classes, and later that morning spends several minutes in a bathroom moments before the shooting.

Video of the gunfire was played for jurors, but not shown to the general public watching the livestream of the trial.

In dramatic testimony last week, several Georgia high school students testified in court about being shot during their algebra class. They recounted through tears seeing a classmate in a pool of blood, then seeing blood on their own bodies and fearing they might die.

There also has been testimony about what prosecutors describe as a “shrine” to a Florida school shooter that Colt Gray kept on a wall next to his computer at home.

He had an interest in Nikolas Cruz, convicted of the 2018 shooting that left 14 students and three staff members dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Marcee Gray testified this week.

Both sides in the case have now rested, and closing arguments are set for Monday afternoon.

Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, listens during his trial, Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, at the Barrow County Courthouse in Winder, Ga. (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

District Attorney Brad Smith, left, points to a weapon that was displayed on the screen during the first day of the trial of Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, in the courtroom at the Barrow County courthouse, Monday, Feb. 16, 2026, in Winder, Ga. (Jason Getz/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, looks down as his attorney gives his opening statement in the courtroom at the Barrow County courthouse, Monday, Feb. 16, 2026, in Winder, Ga. (Jason Getz/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

Colin Gray, the father of Apalachee High School shooting suspect Colt Gray, takes the stand during his trial on Friday, Feb. 27, 2026 in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Pool)