Complex Numbers

As If It Happened Only Yesterday

Not doing my usual random article thing today. I found out after I posted yesterday that one of my favorite songwriters died on the 19th, so this one's about Jim Steinman.

Jim Steinman obituary  
Composer and songwriter who masterminded Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, one of the biggest-selling albums of all time

I'll let the obituary do most of the work, here. I'll be getting together with a friend of mine on Tuesday, someone who's also a fan, and pour one out for the Master of Melodrama.

Jim Steinman, who has died of kidney failure aged 73, made a spectacular career of being bigger and more bombastic than the rest, and his achievement in masterminding Meat Loaf’s album Bat Out of Hell will guarantee his immortality.

Meat Loaf is, of course, a great singer and performer, and one of those whose career survived having been in Rocky Horror. But he wouldn't have enjoyed nearly the success that he did without Steinman's songwriting.

Bat’s producer, Todd Rundgren, thought the album was supposed to be a parody of Bruce Springsteen – members of Springsteen’s E Street Band played on it – and Steinman did not entirely reject parallels with the Boss. His own songs, Steinman said, “are dream operatic, his are street operatic. He’s more West Side Story and I’m more Clockwork Orange.”

I am, of course, also a fan of Springsteen, and I noticed long ago that they shared a lot of backup musicians. Roy Bittan's piano in particular lent itself just as well to Steinman's operatic compositions as it did to Springsteen's more mainstream rock and roll.

Steinman’s career as a solo artist only managed to encompass the album Bad for Good (1981), which reached the UK Top 10 and spun off the modest hit single Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through, but he was in demand from many directions.

I had that album. Still do, actually. Most of its songs have been redone by Meat Loaf and other artists, because Steinman's voice just wasn't up to signing the checks that his fingers wrote. Still, I have a fondness for the album.

In the 1990s Steinman ventured into musical theatre by collaborating with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Whistle Down the Wind (based on the 1961 film).

Because really, there was only one composer who could out-angst Steinman, and that's Webber.

He reunited with Meat Loaf for the last time for the singer’s album Braver Than We Are (2016).

I hope they finally got over their turbulent past for that. Never got that album, though; it was after albums stopped being a thing, really. But now I'm going to have to track it down. (That's a pun, yes. "Track?" No? No? Damn. Just not in the groove today.)

The obit I linked includes a video of I Would Do Anything for Love (concerning which comments about what "that" is will be received with great disdain), but I thought I'd include a video of the song I rule at, when I have a suitable partner, on the karaoke stage.

It never felt so good, it never felt so right
And we're glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife...