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Lowen and Navarro’s Eric Lowen dies of ALS at 60

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Eric Lowen, 60, a singer, songwriter, guitarist and half of the Lowen and Navarro folk group who with his songwriting partner Dan Navarro penned “We Belong” for Pat Benatar, died Friday at Kaiser Permanente Panorama City Hospital, the band announced.

Lowen had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, in 2004. The degenerative disease affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and eventually weakens muscles throughout the body.

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Born Oct. 23, 1951, in Utica, N.Y., Lowen met Navarro in Los Angeles in the early 1980s when they worked as singing waiters at the Great American Food and Beverage Co. After they discovered they harmonized together well, they began performing and writing songs as a duo.

The pair wrote “We Belong” for Benatar in 1984 and it became a top-five hit for her. Lowen, who was tall and blond, and the dark-haired Navarro regularly sang their acoustic versionin concert. The two also wrote for such pop acts as the Bangles, Dave Edmunds and David Lee Roth, and they composed jingles for commercials and TV shows.

Beginning in 1988 Lowen and Navarro played a regular acoustic gig at the Breakaway in Venice, and they released their first album, “Walking on a Wire,” in 1990. They released a handful of studio albums and toured extensively until 2009, when Lowen’s condition worsened.

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