While Steinman had gone to producing others’ work after Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell, Meat Loaf immediately jumped on trying to continue his career revival.

Apparently, Steinman advised him to do something completely unlike Bat out of Hell for his next album, but instead Meat Loaf assembled a band mostly of Bat veterans (Steve Buslowe, Kasim Sulton, Pat Thrall, Patti Russo, Rory Dodd, and Curtis King) to play a motley assortment of songs, many vaguely attempting varying levels of Steinman mimicry. He had a song written by two veterans of the National Lampoon tour on which he and Steinman had famously been performers back in the ’70s (Paul Jacobs and Sarah Durkee) who had written one of his British hits that didn’t make the US back in the ’80s, another written by longtime Steinman programmer/keyboardist Jeff Bova, and covered two real Steinman songs. He covered a ’60s pop tune by the Amen Corner and a ’70s Tom Waits dirge. He did a jokey little tune from Martha Minter Bailey, who doesn’t seem to have any other musical credits to her resume. He went to a post-Van Halen Sammy Hagar for one song. And then he brought in professional schmaltzy hitmaker Diane Warren to write three new songs.

I don’t really blame Meat Loaf for rejecting Steinman’s advice. Steinman had basically told him, “Don’t do what you do best” when the singer had spent a decade wandering around another continent to dwindling crowds while his homeland ignored him completely. I even would have understood if he had wanted to name his next album, no matter what, Bat out of Hell III. (If I were in his position, the rest of my albums for life would be named Bat out of Hell.) The fact that he did not showed some respect for the fact that he and Steinman had only been able to make Bat out of Hell and Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell together, which is why it would be a problem a decade later when he would try to make his own entry without Steinman.

It’s the Diane Warren songs that present everything right and wrong with Meat Loaf’s approach here. It’s not really fair to say that she wrote them for Meat Loaf in an attempt to sound like Steinman unless it is to say that she always wrote songs trying to sound like Jim Steinman. The titles sound forced into Steinman territory with the over-theatricality of “Not a Dry Eye in the House,” the sheer length of “If This Is the Last Kiss (Let’s Make It Last All Night),” and the shameless and obvious apery that is “I’d Lie for You (And That’s the Truth).” (Naming a song “I’d Do Anything for Love II” would have been less obvious. Though Steinman’s response that it was “mild compared to what it imitates,” because “I’d embezzle at least. Sign phony checks.” is absolutely classic.) But the sound is really of a piece with the rest of her work. However, they are still booming ballads that fit Meat Loaf’s voice and Warren, while her songs absolutely are not Steinman songs (and I honestly hate many of them), is an expert craftsperson who was at least not going to produce something as immediately forgettable as much of the album. When your big draw for the album, in 1995, is a song written and produced by Sammy Hagar, getting weak-sauce Steinman-type songs from a professional writer who undoubtedly knows what she’s doing seems like a pretty good idea.

Complicating the ability to complain about Warren’s songs, they end up being the best non-Steinman moments on this album–“I’d Lie for You (And That’s the Truth)” may have a ridiculously sound-alike title to “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” but it actually sounds more like an acoustic-based power ballad from Extreme or Poison than its attempted namesake and is a perfectly reasonable if unspectacular song. “Not a Dry Eye in the House” has stupid lyrics and nothing interesting to say, but it has a soaring melody that’s so good that it ends up being one of the highlights to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Plays the Music of Meat Loaf in 2000. “If This Is the Last Kiss (Let’s Make It Last All Night)” also has nothing interesting to say and clearly attempts its Meat Loaf-goes-country sound starting more from Garth Brooks than Tennessee Ernie Ford, but at least it puts Meat Loaf in territory that values his melodramatic delivery and lung power more than Hagar’s attempt to add some piano to a latter-day Van Halen ballad with a Montrose guitar solo and pretend that makes it sound like Steinman.

With the album opening with a standard-issue anti-condom rocker in “Where the Rubber Meets the Road” and the minor hit “I’d Lie for You (And That’s the Truth),” the drama of the nearly-a-capella intro of “Original Sin” is a reminder of the theater that usually accompanies Meat Loaf’s most successful work. When the music comes in, it’s not a booming piano or dramatic synthesizer but rather a viciously distorted guitar.

And that sets the stage for what this version of the song does differently than either previous recording–it inverts the positions of the guitar and the piano. Instead of being a song based on its piano-and-melody interplay that uses guitars, synthesizers, and drums to heighten its louder moments, this one adapts that piano line to a mix of guitar and drums (played by Kenny Aaronoff, who is not credited as part of the band but plays drums on almost every song on the album) and uses the piano in the places where synths and guitars were before. It also dramatically decreases the amount of backing vocals. It doesn’t do anything surprising once it’s established those changes, but they do stay in place throughout the song.

In addition to the completely new arrangement, Meat Loaf’s version reverts to the Pandora’s Box lyrics but rearranges slightly. The structure of this song is actually really difficult to figure out, so I’m just going to write out my version of it in AB format to show the changes. I’m using numbers to differentiate when it is the same format but different lyrics, which is definitely not the standard way to do things but I think will help to explain things. The Pandora’s Box version is A1/B1/C1/D1/D2/A2/B2/C1/D1/D2/A1/A1/A3. The Meat Loaf version is A1/B1/C1/D1/A1/B2/C1/D1/A1/A2/A1/A3. The original version has essentially a two-part chorus (D1 in my chart starts “All I wanted was a piece of the night” and D2 starts “All I wanted was a spot in the light”) where this version does not include the second part. The Pandora’s Box recording goes back to the intro (“I’ve been looking for an original sin”) as something of a bridge in A2 (“I’ve been looking for the ultimate crime”) with alternate lyrics while Meat Loaf’s returns with the original lyrics, making it come across more like the chorus. And then the outro in the Pandora’s Box version repeats the A1 lyrics twice in a row where the Meat Loaf recording inserts the A2 version between them. And both end with the A3 “I’m applying for a license to thrill” section. The upshot of these changes is that the Meat Loaf version feels a bit more repetitive but not terribly different.

While those who only heard “I’d Lie for You (And That’s the Truth)” wouldn’t know it, Meat Loaf’s voice sounds great through most of this album, with only the higher registers ever presenting issues for him. This song remains in the lower part of his range and he sounds great. I don’t feel like the menacing edge that Laura Theodore (let alone Taylor Dayne) has is quite there for him, but it’s a pretty small difference.

It’s a little amusing to me that this song actually got recorded three times in six years and hasn’t been touched since, but I think this version is the weakest of the three. As much of a guitar fan as I am, I think the atmosphere created by the piano-and-drum interplay beneath the melody really works well in the other versions and I would take either vocal over Meat Loaf’s. I would rank the three versions as Taylor Dayne>Pandora’s Box>Meat Loaf.