Eric Lowen, a singer and songwriter who was half of Lowen & Navarro, the duo that wrote “We Belong,” a pensive, urgent lover’s plea that became a hit for Pat Benatar in 1984, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 60.


The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which had been diagnosed in 2004, said Dan Navarro, his musical partner.


Known for tuneful pop-rock melodies, pleasingly harmonized vocals and thoughtful lyrics about struggling relationships, parenthood, aging and other things relevant to the baby-boom generation they belonged to, Lowen & Navarro had an extended partnership. They met as singing waiters in a West Hollywood restaurant in the late 1970s.


After Ms. Benatar recorded “We Belong” — it reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — they wrote for other bands, including the Bangles, and for movies, including “Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol” and “Casual Sex?”


Both were guitar players, both wrote music and lyrics, and in the late 1980s they began performing and recording together. Their albums included “Walking on a Wire” (1990), “Broken Moon” (1993), “Pendulum” (1995) and “Hogging the Covers” (2006), on which they recorded songs written by others.


Their last album together, “Learning to Fall” (2008), with Phil Parlapiano, is an elegiac ensemble of songs, like “The Smile of a Worried Man” and the title track (which Mr. Lowen wrote with Preston Sturges Jr., a son of the film director), that reflected on mortality. The chorus of “Learning to Fall” goes:


I’ve had to run


I’ve had to crawl


Been rich as a king


Had nothing at all


Still raising hell


And tearing down walls


I know where I stand


I’m learning to fall.


David Eric Lowen was born in Utica, N.Y., on Oct. 23, 1951. His father was a Baptist minister and his mother a former music teacher, and he spent his childhood in various places in the Northeast — Utica, Greece, N.Y., and Ridgewood, N.J. — as his father moved to different churches. He took up the guitar in the ninth grade when his parents gave him one for Christmas. He graduated from Brockport State College (now the College at Brockport, State University of New York), near Rochester.


Mr. Lowen, whose first marriage ended in divorce, is survived by his wife, Kim Ferguson; a brother, Neal; a sister, Karen George, known as Kai; two children, Samuel and Annie-Claire, who are twins; and three stepchildren, Thomas, Katelyn and Hayley Ferguson, triplets who are the same age, 18, as their step-siblings.


After Mr. Lowen received his diagnosis, in 2004, he and Mr. Navarro completed the album “All the Time in the World,” and they continued to perform and record until 2009, when Mr. Lowen’s condition made it impossible. A tribute album for the benefit of Mr. Lowen’s family and A.L.S. charities, “Keep the Light Alive: Celebrating the Music of Lowen & Navarro,” featuring Jackson Browne, the Bangles and others, was released in 2010.


“We were never really huge, but we went on for a long time,” Mr. Navarro said, adding of Mr. Bowen: “He said, ‘I want to keep going.’ We managed five years, 250 shows and three albums. After the diagnosis.”