Typically, I call Pyromania by Def Leppard my favorite album of all time, even though I would take the start of Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell over it any time, because I feel like the latter loses some steam after it opens with six all-time great songs. Listening back to it, I do actually really like “Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)” quite a bit and of course I love “Wasted Youth” (Though it’s difficult to count that as a “song,” per se.), so I think it might be most accurate to say that “Everything Louder than Everything Else,” “Back into Hell,” and “Lost Boys and Golden Girls” are the songs that kind of let down the second half.

I reviewed Steinman’s original recording of “Lost Boys and Golden Girls” here, and this recording doesn’t change all that much from the original. Bill Payne plays the piano this time and it’s just a bit slower throughout. Jeff Bova adds some atmospheric synthesized horns and guitars.* Eric Troyer, Rory Dodd, and Kasim Sulton provide backing vocals, Troyer’s only credit on the album.

*I presume that the parts that sound like a clean electric guitar must be Bova on a synthesizer, because there is no credit for a guitar or any other plucked stringed instrument. I honestly had never noticed that there is no such credit before and so had always thought it was a guitar.

Thus, there are only two real changes to this recording: Meat Loaf replacing Rory Dodd and replacing Rundgren’s guitars in the bridge and ending with the synthesized guitars.

For the former, Meat Loaf is, by this point in his career, an upgrade. I’m honestly not sure that the Bat out of Hell Meat Loaf could have pulled off a vocal this gentle, but he handles it well on this recording. There’s not a ton of room for him to do much with his voice, but there’s a much stronger sense of yearning that comes from his voice than came from Dodd’s. He almost gives the sense that he is begging, which the lyrics do sound like, where Dodd didn’t have as strong of an emotional delivery, at least for me.

However, the best change to the song is replacing the hyper-’70s Todd Rundgren guitars with those synthesized guitar plucks. It might have been fun to hear what Eddie Martinez (Or, even better, an older Todd Rundgren) would have done with the space, but it seems likely that anything would have been out of place in the song that sort of serves as the lullaby to the Bat out of Hell series.

It’s still not one of my favorite songs, even though the melody is pretty. I do think this recording is better than Steinman’s original. But it still feels like an underwhelming end after how great the first 3/4 of this album is.

While there is still plenty to cover in Steinman’s future after 1993, this album is, for me, the high-water mark of his career and it kind of serves as his last new project. While much of this album had already been recorded before, there are precious few really new Steinman songs that would ever come out again, and he would never personally be in charge of a full-album project like this again.

It is, to a large extent, abject conjecture to explain why we didn’t get a third Bat out of Hell from Steinman and Meat Loaf later or at least more Steinman-helmed projects (Yes, Meat Loaf did release something he called Bat out of Hell III and a different album, Braver than We Are, with all songs written by Steinman, but neither of those is any more Bat out of Hell III than Bad for Good or Dead Ringer is Bat out of Hell II.), but I would guess that there are a number of factors. He turned 46 just after this album’s release, so he was simply getting older. He had a lot of health problems during the 21st century, and he was so private about is personal life that he could have been hiding them for years before that. He got involved in a lot more high-profile theater projects, from writing lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Weber to the highly successful Der Tanz der Vampire to the aborted Batman and Crybaby musicals to the enormous flop Dance of the Vampires, so maybe his interest had just shifted away from rock back to musicals. Whatever the reason, the period starting with the first Bat out of Hell and ending with the second is what really feels like the heart of his career, so this point definitely feels like sort of a chapter ending in this series.

This probably does also mark a point at which the posts will become shorter. More of the songs are covers of earlier versions (It’s really basically one new song from Bat out of Hell: The Musical and the Braver Than We Are album left to cover every song written by Steinman ever released commercially.), and there just isn’t as much that he’s working on. I will have to decide case-by-case whether to include some things (e.g., Whistle down the Wind has his lyrics but that’s all; Der Tanz der Vampire is his music entirely but, except for two lines at the end, is in German; the aborted Batman: The Musical does have demos available online but was never professionally recorded or commercially released; Meat Loaf did a handful of covers of Steinman songs without Steinman over the years; *shudder* the MTV Wuthering Heights movie) but, truthfully, the most important parts of the project are complete.