Summary.
Jim Steinman has at least one main claim to fame: he has coined a production style that makes Phil Spector's "wall of sound" seem shy.
But Jim Steinman was also the most extravagant, whimsical, unconventional composer and arranger of pop melodies of the 1980s, even though only one album was credited to his name. Both Meat Loaf, the melodramatic rocker of Bat Out of Hell (1977), a hysterical and emphatic exaggeration of rock'n'roll cliches, and Pandora's Box, whose symphonic-choral song-cycle Original Sin (1989) was the ultimate in rock melodrama, were his creations. The brutal and romantic Original Sin (halfway between Phil Spector, a gospel mass and a Beethoven ouverture) and the heart-breaking ballad It's All Coming Back To Me show the range and breadth of Steinman's art. Pandora's Box album wed decadent rock of the 1970s and punk spirit of the 1980s. Steinman composed a metaphysical concept that mimicked Broadway musicals and that alternated Zappa-esque parody and street pathos. This was brutal, colossal music of manic crescendos, of punishing rhythms of delirious choirs. Total Eclipse Of The Heart (1983), sung by Bonnie Tyler, and Making Love Out Of Nothing At All (1983), sung by Air Supply, were incursions into pure pop territory. Steinman's productions are the quintessential of magniloquent, tragic, titanic, desperate. His singers bleed his lyrics. His keyboards are the thunders of the apocalypse. His melodies are religious psalms. His own albums Bad For Good (1981) and Tanz der Vampire (1998) highlighted his demonic side. Steinman wed the rebellious spirit of rock'n'roll with Wagner's titanic sense of impotence, and thus reenacted the fundamental theme of the human condition that countless poets had explored over the centuries.
Full bio.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Jim Steinman was born in Claremont, California, in 1948. His family moved to New York, where Jim grew up and studied. During college, he composed his first musical, "Dream Engine" (the singer was Richard Gere, later famous as a Hollywood actor). In 1971, he was hired by the New York Shakespeare Festival and met the singer Marvin Lee Aday (later better known as Meat Loaf), to whom he entrusted a role in his new musical, "More Than You Deserve," which premiered in 1974. Meanwhile, Meat Loaf was gaining attention in the cult movie "Rocky Horror Picture Show" (playing the biker thug who epitomizes the "rock hero").
Steinman’s next show, "Neverland" (1977), again with Meat Loaf, contained several songs that combined wild rock and roll with symphonic arrangements inspired by Wagner. These songs became the core of Bat Out of Hell (Epic, 1977), Meat Loaf’s debut album. The album offers a revival of 1950s music, which in reality exaggerates Phil Spector’s sonic assault and Bruce Springsteen’s furious ballads to a hysterical and emphatic extreme, endlessly exploring the epic of the rebellious, sinful, and cursed rocker, popular during the "American Graffiti" era, but with much more irony than nostalgia. This is evident in the overwhelming rock-and-roll dramatics of Paradise By The Dashboard Light, performed in duet with Ellen Foley (eight minutes), and Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad.
Meat Loaf’s tracks are anthems to the rebellious ideology of rock, sung with a lyrical flair that makes him the most operatic rocker since Roy Orbison. Steinman perfectly captured the mood of the younger generations, and his songs embody the most authentic and wild spirit of rock and roll. The album would go on to sell 25 million copies. It also features two other long melodramas: Bat Out Of Hell (ten minutes) and For Crying Out Loud (nine minutes).
At this point, however,
Meat Loaf stepped away due to physical problems, and the songs for the second album were released under Jim Steinman’s name, sung by Jim Steinman, on Bad For Good (Epic, 1981). Rock And Roll Dreams Come Through becomes a minor hit. The album also contains lengthy songs such as Dance in My Pants, Stark Raving Love, and Left in the Dark.
Due to contractual obligations, Steinman still had to make an album for Meat Loaf, which is released a few months later: Deadringer. Steinman also composed his first film soundtrack: "A Small Circle Of Friends".
The year 1983 is a landmark year. Bonnie Tyler brings to massive success Total Eclipse of the Heart, a typical “Wagnerian” and romantic Steinman composition appearing on the album Faster Than The Speed Of Night, and the band Air Supply score a hit with Making Love Out Of Nothing At All.
Steinman takes the first and second spots on the Billboard charts (the first time since the Beatles), even though neither song is credited to him.
Another Steinman masterpiece appears on another Tyler album: Loving You's A Dirty Job But Somebody's Got To Do It (1984). Steinman also writes Read 'Em And Weep for Barry Manilow. The following year, he writes two songs for the soundtrack of "Streets of Fire": Nowhere Fast and Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young, and even composes a song for Barbra Streisand.
Meanwhile, Steinman has prepared material for an album of his own. He cannot secure funding and ends up investing a million dollars of his own money in what will become a colossal flop.
Original Sin (Virgin, 1989), credited to Pandora's Box, is nonetheless Jim Steinman’s masterpiece, the album in which his concept of symphonic rock reaches its most baroque and expressive heights. The “orchestra” Steinman employs consists of his monumental electronic keyboards, four female vocalists, Roy Bittan on piano, Jeff Bova on electronic keyboards, Jim Bralower on electronic percussion, Eddie Martinez on electric guitar, and Steve Buslowe on bass. The album is a decadent concept work on the theme of sin, sometimes approaching the metaphysical, at other times descending into “Zappa-like” comedy. Overall, it feels more like a musical than a rock album: the singers seem to “act out” a story more than they sing songs, and the arrangement is so symphonic it could rival any Broadway orchestra.
The overture and centerpiece is Original Sin, a masterful exercise in counterpoint, in which instruments and voices pile up ever more brutally, somewhere between Phil Spector and Beethoven—a perfect clockwork mechanism in which female voices and keyboards interlock and fuse into a single harmonic block. Six thrilling minutes in which the lyrics become a universal hymn to the wild element of the human soul, its destiny of perdition, and at the same time to the need for redemption and salvation hidden behind that infernal instinct. One singer invokes the poignant leitmotif, accompanied only by piano; then suddenly keyboards and percussion explode in a torrent, and the singers attack the leitmotif with gospel ferocity. From there, the song launches into a sensational crescendo, propelled each time by a variation in the choir arrangement (first all in falsetto, at the end all at full voice), always supported by the martial cadence of the piano and the harmonic blocks of the electronic keyboards. The music fades. One singer invokes, “I'm applying for a license to thrill... there'll be hell to pay some day... because we'll always be paying.” And the choir, like in a Greek tragedy, reiterates, “I've been looking for the original sin...”
The tigress Gina Taylor intones the desperate melody of Safe Sex, another pop number that could fit in a Broadway musical. Steinman’s melodrama, however, is a genre of its own, as it manages to touch the hearts of adolescents the way punk rock or heavy metal can—but using an orgy of electronic keyboards and soaring sopranos instead of screams and guitar riffs.
Holly’s raw, wild voice performs the song that most resembles a punk anthem, Good Girls Go To Heaven, a scathing, fast-paced invective whose lyrics are at once desperate and sarcastic (“good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere”). Steinman continues to play with the themes of sin, the appeal of the forbidden, and at the same time the “lost,” “marginalized,” and “failed” condition that follows. Within these songs lie all the contemporary tragedies of drug abuse and AIDS. Ellen Foley once again sings My Little Red Book, an ironic nursery-rhyme style number in the vein of 1960s songs.
Requiem Metal even playfully references Verdi’s Requiem... then the melodrama resumes, that genre halfway between heaven and hell: It's All Coming Back To Me, an elegy of heart-wrenching desire, with one of those piano motifs Steinman dishes out with maximum romanticism.
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be (ten minutes) is the “movement” that closes this exhausting symphony in a solemn and metaphysical manner (somewhat reminiscent of Meat Loaf’s More Than You Deserve). Once again, Gina Taylor is the solo voice delivering the powerful and moving gospel, and once again the piano drives the song with sweeping chords. The heartfelt line “say a prayer for the fallen angels” repeats with ever greater intensity as the choir and symphonic keyboards join in. In the end, only an a cappella call-and-response remains.
The entire album is driven by the infernal rhythms of the keyboards.
After that commercial flop, Steinman eked out a living producing records and writing film scores. In 1993, he wrote Meat Loaf’s comeback, Bat Out of Hell II (MCA, 1993), which included I'd Do Anything For Love. Celine Dion brought It's All Coming Back To Me to success, restoring financial security to Steinman.
His next project was the
musical Tanz der Vampire (Polydor, 1998), premiered in Vienna,
which contains the nine-minute Carpe Noctem.
Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell III - The Monster Is Loose (2006) features some old Steinman songs, but Steinman did not collaborate on the music, and in fact sued Meat Loaf. However he contributed all songs to Meat Loaf's Braver Than We Are (2016). Steinman's musical "Bat Out of Hell The Musical" (2016) opened in Manchester.
Perhaps no one has ever penetrated so deeply into the rebellious and desperate psyche of teenagers with simple rock songs. Perhaps no one has ever arranged them in such a mature way as to make them seem like pieces of classical music. Perhaps no one has understood what rock music is quite like he did.
Jim Steinman died in 2021 at the age of 73.
Meat Loaf died in 2022.
