Jules Shear at the Byrdcliffe Theater

“The small things that go on in people’s lives, I guess; the little things,” said singer-songwriter Jules Shear to Dick Clark in 1985 when the “American Bandstand” host asked him what his songs were about. “You know, you’ve only got three- [or] three-and-half minutes in a song, so you don’t want to write about something big.”

Shear’s run as a recording artist echoes that philosophy; despite his spending more than five decades in the game he’s never recorded any Top 40 hits himself, and in recent years he’s kept his live performance schedule on the diminutive side. And yet over the course of his career, in a way, he’s reached massive heights, penning huge hits for the likes of Cyndi Lauper, the Bangles, and others. On December 6, the reclusive local musician will reemerge for a rare, intimate solo concert, this one at the Byrdcliffe Theater.

“I’d rather write songs than perform live,” says Shear via phone. “I’m not planning to play in New York or anywhere else any time soon. [The Byrdcliffe date] is just a one-off, there isn’t any tour. It’s just…a gig, you know?”

Born in Pittsburgh in 1952, Shear landed in 1973 in Los Angeles, where he and future Eagles/Don Henley songwriter Jack Tempchin put together a band called the Funky Kings, who made an album for Arista Records but disintegrated after being dropped by the label for poor sales. Next he formed Jules and the Polar Bears, a critically lauded quartet that signed to Columbia and made two albums of solid new wave/power pop, 1978’s Got No Breeding and 1979’s Fenetiks; the band made one more album for the imprint but were likewise let go before it could be released (titled Bad for Business, the long-lost set came out in 1996).

After the Polar Bears went south, Shear struck out as a solo artist with 1983’s Watchdog. The debut disc’s 10 originals didn’t bring its maker any hits under his own name, but its “All Through the Night” was rerecorded by Cyndi Lauper for a Top Five smash, and “Whispering Your Name” was remade by Alison Moyet for the UK Top 20. The Bangles’ 1985 version of “If She Knew What She Wants,” the opening cut of Shear’s sophomore album, The Eternal Return, was a Top 30 single; The Eternal Return also contained Shear’s only sizeable personal hit, the Lauper collaboration “Steady,” which went to number 48 in the US.

Amid more solo recording and composing for others—he cowrote for Cars guitarist Elliot Easton’s 1985 Change No Change—Shear led two more short-lived outfits, Reckless Sleepersand Raisins in the Sun, and lived in Boston in the early 1980s when he and Aimee Mann, then with ’Til Tuesday, were an item. He relocated to New York to host MTV’s “Unplugged” for 13 episodes but was soon drawn to Woodstock, having been smitten by the town while recording his first album there with producer Todd Rundgren. “I thought, ‘You know, I could probably live here, that would be cool’,” he recalls. “I figured that having a place with a writing room, a whole setup, would be great.”

Shear and his wife, singer-songwriter Pal Shazar, have been Woodstockers since the mid-1980s and released a duo album, Shear Shazar, in 2013. His last solo effort was 2022’s well-named Slower, and right now he’s finishing up a new, yet-to-be-titled album. “Byrdcliffe is a great place to play; this will be my third time there and I’m going to do some new songs and some songs that people already know,” he says, adding, when asked about the potential dilemma of his songs being, via their versions by others, better known than he is. “Anybody can do my songs, that’s fine with me.”

This article appears in December 2025.