After the overflowing-with-excitement “Out of the Frying Pan (And into the Fire),” Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell makes an abrupt turn to its most delicate ballad, a true Steinman masterpiece that I think may actually be my favorite song he has ever written.

Almost like tiptoeing footsteps leading us into the song, we open with a soft piano line playing the melody with a mix of chords and individual notes. Wordless choir-like backing vocals join in midway through, setting an atmosphere of loss that has more than a hint of religiosity when Meat Loaf’s vocal begins, a soft delivery befitting the current circumstances.

Right from the start, this song sets forth its lyrical structure. Each verse is about a particular life-altering traumatic event set in a season of the year, then the singer reveals that he can’t entirely leave the past behind, resulting in the title phrase. It’s a story song, but not really telling a single story so much as telling the story of one man’s life.

In the first verse, he describes the death of his childhood best friend, Kenny. He begins by setting it in summer, a representation of fun, happiness, and (especially for children) freedom. He describes the innocence and thirst for adventure that one would expect for two young boys vividly, ending with “There was so much left to dream, and so much time to make it real.” But then Kenny died (“They said he crashed and burned/I know I’ll never learn why any boy should die so young”), leaving the singer having lost his adventuring friend. While “it was long ago and it was far away,” he also laments that “there are times I think I see him peeling out of the dark/I think he’s right behind me now, and he’s gaining ground!”

Then the second verse is about an abusive father. The father is worn down by a failed life and takes it out on the singer–“My father’s eyes were blank as he hit me again and again and again.” The singer therefore resolved to run away from his home to evade a father he believed would never let him go and escaped. This verse takes place in the winter, the time of cold, sorrow, and pain. Also, I think there might be a metaphorical meaning to it beginning with “And when the sun descended and the nights arose,” but I will get to that later. Still, the singer is haunted by those memories: “Though the nightmare should be over/Some of the terrors are still intact/I hear that ugly coarse and violent voice/And then he grabs me from behind and then he pulls me back!”

Finally, the third verse tells of what appears to be a positive development in his life that also still haunts him. “There was a beauty living on the edge of town/She always put the top up and the hammer down/And she taught me everything I’ll ever know about the mystery and the muscle of love.” At first, this sounds out of place with the clear trauma of the first two verses, but I think the trauma is buried in the details of the next stanza: “The stars would glimmer and the moon would glow/I’m in the backseat with my Julie like a Romeo/And the signs along the highway all said/Caution! Kids at play!” Obviously, this isn’t a real image, since a highway would never have such signs. I think it’s an oblique way of telling us that she got pregnant. He says, “Those were the rights of spring/And we did everything/There was salvation every night/We got our dreams reborn and our upholstery torn/But everything we tried was right,” suggesting that there is some reason that their sexual activity would be seen as problematic while he argues that it was “right.” Spring is often a metaphor for sexual activity and/or procreation and since the former is openly described here, I think it’s reasonable to guess that the latter happens off-screen, as it were. He doesn’t explain her absence from his current life at all but instead says, “She used her body just like a bandage/She used my body just like a wound/I’ll probably never know where she disappeared/But I can see her rising up out of the back seat now/Just like an angel rising up from a tomb!”

But why does he seemingly fear her return? He sees her rising up like an angel rising up from a tomb. Angels are often symbols of vengeance and rising up from a tomb also suggests that her “rising up” would be terrifying to the singer. Angels also can be (well, in fact, they pretty much are by definition) religious symbols. Is he fearing divine retribution from an abortion (Remember this is in the past from 1994, and I would argue it’s reasonable to assume it’s in 1977 specifically)? Is he fearing retribution because she didn’t have an abortion and he ran away from the birth of a child, an angel being a symbol for protection like she would presumably be for the child and he had refused to be by running away? I think either interpretation makes sense and fits with everything else, but I do think that the former is more likely for reasons I will explain.

Bringing all of these verses together is the chorus, stating, “It was long ago and it was far away/Oh god it seems so very far/And if life is just a highway/Then the soul is just a car/And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.” No matter how long ago things are and how far away they feel, we never really escape our traumas. They shape and mold us, and we rarely can move on from them.

The lyrics are absolutely stunning, but I actually have a couple of unusual thoughts about them.

First, there is clearly a verse missing. Steinman said that this was the last song he wrote for the album and was still working on it up to the last minute (which may explain why Bill Payne was on piano instead of Roy Bittan), and perhaps the best evidence of that being the case is that the repeated seasons metaphor is not completed. We have summer, winter, and spring, but no fall. Even in the Bat out of Hell: The Musical version years later, there is still no fourth verse, but it sure seems like he planned one. I don’t know what it would be–there isn’t a specific element that feels like it’s missing. Maybe since fall’s literary meanings are so well represented in the rest of the song, he decided to skip it, but it just seems unlikely to me.

Second, in spite of his protestations, I think this is a song that Steinman wrote for Meat Loaf, in a very specific way. While there has been much speculation over the years about the identity of the “Kenny” who dies in the first verse, I know of no strong evidence of who he was. Steinman never talked about an abusive childhood and no one who knew him then has mentioned any suspicions of same. Steinman never mentioned any kind of relationship like what he describes in the third verse. But Meat Loaf had an abusive and violent drunk for a father and ran away from home shortly after his mother’s death. (“And then the sun descended and the nights arose” is perhaps a poetic reference to that event.) Meat Loaf described a relationship with an older woman after running away from home that sounds a lot like what the third verse describes (though as far as I know he never mentioned either an abortion or a child–the latter would seem likely to gain public attention when he became wealthy and famous, which makes the former more likely, though either could still be the case). I don’t know about the first verse still, but it seems to me like Steinman wrote the song for Meat Loaf about Meat Loaf’s own life.

After the first chorus, we get an instrumental passage that introduces some Jeff Bova synthesizers, some Eddie Martinez guitars, and some Rick Marotta drums briefly. The next verse slowly adds those elements all in until the pre-chorus cuts back to Meat Loaf and a piano. The chorus then builds back up again to another instrumental passage that’s longer and bigger, giving Martinez plenty of room for a killer solo. The third verse goes through another build up to a booming version of the chorus that then fades away to Meat Loaf repeating, “She used her body just like a bandage/She used my body just like a wound/I’ll never know where she disappeared/But I can see her rising up out of the back seat now” before we exit.

While Meat Loaf’s range is often cited for criticism, that does ignore that he has some skills as a singer, and this song absolutely shows off the skills he does have. It’s a song with a huge amount of dynamic range even if it has little range of pitch, and he absolutely kills those dynamics. He delivers a soft, gentle bit at the opening and at a few other points and goes all the way up to a booming shout in the final chorus, and there is no mistaking the emotion in his voice through every note. I remember reading a review once that said that Meat Loaf “sings every note as if his life depends on it,” and this song is as good an example as there is of that quality. (And if you doubt that he really is doing that himself, listen to the difference between his two deliveries of “She used her body just like a bandage/She used my body just like a wound.” He is feeling completely different things the two times he delivers these lines.)

Music doesn’t come better than this. The entire song is based around the same set of chord changes as “Surf’s Up” that also served as part of “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be,” which means that this song is the closest there is to a bigger, better arrangement of that ballad. Add in the great, catchy hooks and some of the best lyrics ever committed to a microphone and you have an amazing final product.