After growing up in the Brooklyn neighborhood Gerritsen Beach, Smyth joined Scandal as lead vocalist in 1981. The band released a self-titled debut EP the next year. Featuring the song "Goodbye to You," it went on to become Columbia Records' biggest selling EP. In 1984, they put out their follow-up, Warrior. Buoyed by MTV airplay, the album peaked at No. 17 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, and the first song off the release, also titled "The Warrior," was a Top 10 hit. However, despite their success, internal strife within the band led to their break-up soon afterwards.
Solo career
Following the end of Scandal, Smyth was invited by her friend Eddie Van Halen to join the band Van Halen to replace David Lee Roth as lead singer. However, she declined the offer, because she was eight months pregnant and "It was just not the right time for me," she says now. "I was a New Yorker, I didn't want to live in L.A.... and those guys were drunk and fighting all the time." She guest-appeared on the Hooters 1985 album Nervous Night on the song "Where Do the Children Go" as an accompanying vocalist. Smyth released her first solo album, Never Enough, in 1987. It contained her version of the Tom Waits song "Downtown Train," which Rod Stewart would make a hit three years later, and the title track "Never Enough," which was co-written with members of the Hooters and based on a song of the same title that Hooters members Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman had written for their earlier band, Baby Grand. She put out another solo effort in 1992, the eponymous Patty Smyth. Off of that effort, she secured a hit record via a duet with Don Henley of the Eagles, titled "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough." This peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was certified gold for sales of 500,000. The album, also certified gold, featured an additional US Top 40 hit with "No Mistakes" and also spawned the minor hit "I Should Be Laughing." Smyth had previously recorded with Henley as a backing singer on several songs on his albums Building the Perfect Beast and The End of the Innocence. Smyth subsequently co-wrote the 1994 song "Look What Love Has Done," nominated for a Grammy and an Academy Award after its inclusion in the soundtrack to the feature filmJunior. Further soundtrack commissions resulted in her writing and composing the theme tune, "Wish I Were You," to the 1998 feature film Armageddon. In 2015, to promote the release of her Christmas album called Come On December, she crowd-funded a campaign to support the Headstrong Project with all the money raised on the pre-orders of her album going to the non-profit. The album featured the single "Broken," and the music video for the single was released just before Veterans Day, and was filmed on the grounds of a Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter. The album was released on November 20, 2015.
Reunion with Scandal
In 2004, VH1 recruited Smyth and the surviving members of Scandal for a Bands Reunited episode, resulting in a small reunion tour of concerts on the East Coast of the United States in 2005. The next year, Columbia/Legacy released a new Scandal compilation CD as part of the We Are the '80s series. The compilation contained three unreleased tracks from the 1982 recording sessions as well as "All My Life," previously available on the flip side of "Goodbye to You". In July 2008, Billboard reported the upcoming release of new music by the band. They debuted their first single as a band in over 24 years on January 17, 2009 in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Personal life
Smyth has a daughter, Ruby, with her first husband Richard Hell. She met John McEnroe in 1993; their daughter Anna was born in 1995, and the couple married in 1997. They have since had another daughter, Ava. Smyth and McEnroe live in a duplex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Patty Smyth among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire.
