The Music of Meat Loaf (1947-2022)
When a musician dies, you get a lot of people talking about what they liked but often not “If you’ve never listened, or are only vaguely familiar with That One Song (or Those Two Songs), here’s what you should listen to.” With Meat Loaf, it’s such an easy question to answer. He had two amazing albums in collaboration with songwriter Jim Steinman and both are absolutely worth your time if you like good music with good singing (and can handle some operatic angst). Sometimes an artist’s best known hits are not their best stuff, but with Meat Loaf it tracks.
If you have never listened to the Bat Out of Hell II album in particular, I cannot recommend it enough. Along with Chris Isaak’s Forever Blue, it’s one of the best album-albums out there (as opposed to just a collection of good songs, which is more common). Cover to cover it is one of the best albums I have ever heard. Meat Loaf has an amazing voice, and Jim Steinman is an amazing songwriter, and the two collaborated… well… amazingly. If not for the second follow-up, I’d be here praising the first because it is also fantastic and would have its place in the hall of fame in my mind if it wasn’t overshadowed by its successor.
For people of my age, who missed the first album and caught the second, this song and music video was the first exposure:
It’s one of the catchiest songs on the album, albeit not the best. It became something of a punch line, but if you really listen to it – and you can get lost in the trademark passionate angst of the genre – it’s actually quite solid. The music video in particular makes it work.
Objects in the Rearview Mirror, also shared by Andrew, was probably was my favorite song on the album, and was the third single but the second song I heard, and the one that compelled me to get the CD. It was one of the first five or so I ever purchased, and holds up better than almost the other ones acquired from that era.
The song for which the albums were named after came before music videos were really a thing, but it lives up to its billing:
The two albums came fifteen years apart for a variety of reasons ranging from Meat Loaf’s health to the egos of two artistic giants. Meat Loaf released albums without Jim Steinman, and Steinman had collaborations with other musicians, but neither were as good apart as they were together. Meat Loaf has an amazing voice, but it’s an amazing voice almost perfectly tuned for Steinman’s music. The combination of opera, pomp, and melodrama. Unfortunately, Meat Loaf’s overall career would be uneven due to intermittent health problems that strained his endurance and his voice box.
With his voice and his manner, Meat Loaf was a showman and so it’s no surprising that he also had an acting career. He did not demonstrate a whole lot of range in the parts he took, but he had a persona that was, in my opinion, not properly put to use by film and television. A missed opportunity for us all.
Home by Now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laR3JoyPdm4 )is my favorite Meat Loaf song, by a long shot.
As it happened, early in the month it came out pseudo randomly in my car playlist, and I’ve been playing it over and over like a maniac in the last three weeks. It still comes up a couple of times a day, and then I replay it three or four times until I let something else come up.
In my mind it plays like an Opera overture, where the Chorus and the lead bass/baritone respond to each other. It’s an opera about soldiers bivouacking on the eve of a battle, and reflecting on why are they there, instead of home with their families.
There last weeks, I’ve played a game with myself. If Home by Now is the overture, what other Meat Loaf songs would make it into that opera? Heaven can Wait is sung by the hero going to war. Is Nothing Sacred would then be the hero confronting his beloved, who married another man while he was away. And so on. It would have been a really cool opera.
Ripping off another musical genii, Thank You for the Music, Michael Lee Aday.Report
Home By Now and No Matter What were from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind. Steinman was the lyricist, though.
The way I imagine this going down is Lloyd Webber deciding to write a musical set in America and asking himself, “Who’s the most American lyricist I know?”Report
No cause of death announced.
His daughter posted on Jan 7th (about Covid) “We are not sick, but we have too many friends and family testing positive right now, positive but doing ok”.
I liked his music.Report
Dead Ringer (1981) was another Steinman/Loaf collaboration, but Meat Loaf wasn’t exactly at the top of his game. Apparently he had planned to rerecord it for some time, but never got around to it, which is a shame.
There was also Braver Than We Are (2016), but the less said about that one, the better.Report
Dead Ringer had a couple of high spots that weren’t that bad.
Everybody talks about the duet with Cher (as they should!) but I think that “I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Back” is a song that would have fit on Bat out of Hell.Report
What’s the deal with all the people who couldn’t figure out what “that” was? If you’ve only ever heard the title, sure, but I get the impression that even a lot of fans were confused about this, despite the fact that the various referents of the “that” were spelled out clearly in the lyric.Report