Back in the early days of this project of writing about all of Jim Steinman’s music, I was stymied by this song and never got around to writing about it. Well, the day has come.

As a general rule, people like to split things into extreme binaries and ignore everything in between. The internet and social media get criticized for people presenting sociopolitical extremes with no room between them, but that’s actually a general human tendency.

One place where that tendency toward binary extremes is easy to find is in discussion of Meat Loaf’s voice. He is often described as either one of the greatest or one of the worst singers in rock history and rarely does he fall somewhere between. While it’s not true that reality is always somewhere between extremes, I do think that in the case of Meat Loaf’s voice it is accurate. He has some real strengths and some real weaknesses as a singer. He’s not Yannis Papadopoulos, who can quite seriously sing anything in any way at any given time; but he’s also not Tom Waits (“He waits for what? His voice to improve!” is an old joke for a reason). He doesn’t have a huge range and he has, at times, struggled to give softer deliveries or control his vibrato, which is rather wide for a non-opera singer. But to those who question his strengths, I submit this performance. It’s a booming, building, heavily symphonic ballad that heavily rests on Meat Loaf’s voice and showcases everything he does do well: his lung power, his complete lack of self-consciousness, and his sense of the dramatic. The song doesn’t demand an extensive range, but it allows him to display strength across various volumes, ranging from a gentle whisper in the opening lines to powerful shouts late in the runtime, and he excels in all of them. Nothing in this song seems rough; it is the best vocal performance of his career.

While “for crying out loud” is an idiom, the ending makes it clear enough that one point of the song is using the phrase in a way that doesn’t match its idiomatic meaning. It’s an expression of exasperation in general, but here Steinman uses it in a more literal sense, saying, “I love you for your ability to cry out loud.” Fundamentally, it’s a song about a relationship between two very opposite people and the singer’s difficulty reconciling himself with that relationship and the changes it has wrought within himself. He came into their relationship as an emotional unavailable person who was in it for fun. His partner was an emotionally open person (able to cry out loud) who helped him open himself up. But, now that he has embraced his emotional self, he has to face fears about losing his partner.

Now, he sees the error in his past ways but he’s stuck at a metaphorical crossroads where he is afraid to lose his partner but is also afraid of what stands before him. He’s in the middle of nowhere, because it’s uncharted territory. He’s “near the end of the line” because he knows that he needs to make a decision. He’s “at a border to somewhere” because he is at the point of needing to choose between versions of himself, the one from before he met this partner and the current, and he has fears about accepting either path. The line “open up the sky and let the planet that I love shine through” seems to suggest that he has made a decision, asking to let the earth shine through into the heaven because he now loves the former so much thanks to this partner. And then he explains the reason for his decision by stating, “For crying out loud, you know I love you.”

The references to California and the imagery about sinking in the sand and feeling the chilly wind (The latter of which always stood out to me–I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chilly” describing anything in California anywhere else in my life.) must be artifacts of the song’s origin as a song for the musical Kid Champion in 1975, which starred Christopher Walken (!) playing an overnight rags-to-riches rock star dealing with every associated problem of his sudden stardom. Steinman was living out some of those feelings by the point Bat out of Hell released, having spent two years largely on the road with Meat Loaf seeking a record deal.

However, even in this serious, deep context, Steinman makes jokes. “For revving me up when I’m starting to stall” and “Can’t you see my faded Levis bursting apart” are pretty clear examples of sexual innuendo. The latter is so explicit that it barely even qualifies as innuendo. For all of the serious emotionality throughout the song, the singer still wants to bring sex into it. I think one can argue with some credibility that this point is either extraordinarily juvenile–he he, sex, he he–or a deeply progressive view of sex as an accepted part of a whole person combined with a recognition of it playing a part in this relationship. Either way, I think Steinman is poking fun at the usual bifurcation of sex and romance in rock and roll, but it’s interesting that it can be seen as such extreme opposites.

Musically, this song is really what I think of as Bat out of Hell‘s signature ballad, much more than “Heaven Can Wait,” because it fits in more with the album as a whole. It’s largely led by Meat Loaf’s voice and piano, but there’s a lot of orchestration going on below it, eventually including multiple strings and horns that Meat Loaf shouts above. The ending of the song is absolutely enormous, but distinctly non-rock. In his travels between worlds, theater critics would often find Steinman’s music too rock while rock critics found it too Broadway. There are few examples of the latter that make more sense than this one–it’s all crashing cymbals, full-blast horns, strings, seemingly multiple pianos, and Meat Loaf’s voice above it all (with some help from Rory Dodd, who is the only credited backing vocal in this song). It’s something that no one else would have tried to put on a rock album, but it’s a great way to end Bat out of Hell, especially since it turned out to be so long before the sequel.