After the two Steinman songs, Meat Loaf first revisits Diane Warren, who wrote his one non-Steinman US hit, “I’d Lie for You (And That’s the Truth)” in 1995. Her song, “Cry over Me,” is one of the best on the album. Like “Blind as a Bat,” it’s an enormous but very poppy feel, sort of like power pop with lots of extra bombast. But her ballad has some real drama, and it’s probably the most effective Steinman clone (to the extent that it is one–it is definitely far more conventional than his writing) I’ve heard.

Then, he heads back to the Steinman well, but this time it’s with a song we haven’t covered in this series before. Shortly after the release of this album, Steinman fans would hear a demo version that came to the internet directly from Steinman, having been written, planned, and recorded for Batman: The Musical. It was written as the song for the horrifying, corrupt leaders of Gotham City, looking down on the crime-riddled disaster zone that they own with a disgusting sort of gleeful hatred of the “common man.”

To me, this song has always felt like it’s some sort of attempt to evolve forward the sound of “Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back.” I have commented a number of times that the closest thing there is to a genre that matches Steinman’s sound is either opera metal or symphonic metal. Both had started getting some traction in Europe, where Steinman was then working, in the 1997-2000 period, with Within Temptation, Theatre of Tragedy, and Nightwish all arriving on the scene with at least some level of success. I can’t help but wonder if Steinman came across this music, heard the similarity, and so tried to write in a more “metal” direction, away from the piano-based rock and roll sound that had made so much of his career.

The drama gets cranked to 11 from the start of things song, opening with a portentous mix of strings, organ, and delicate bits of harp. It sets a very dark, foreboding atmosphere, though for some reason it immediately sounds like Final Fantasy music to me. Some booming power chords from Steve Vai, Paul Crook, Corky James, and Clint Walsh (Who is playing what I can’t even begin to guess.), bass from Kasim Sulton, and Kenny Aronoff drums then arrive in stings, almost like they are bashing that orchestral opening to death. A simple, repetitive but fast-moving rhythm guitar part and similar bass then join a rhythm that, while it doesn’t seem all that interesting, is notably missing a backbeat. Dramatic strings still ride along with it as Meat Loaf begins delivering his vocal. Cymbals, guitars, and strings become more prominent every time the volume increases until the chorus, which includes incredibly loud drums and church bells. The only real change the rest of the way is a short, surprisingly dull Steve Vai guitar solo on top of synths and claps.

Meat Loaf’s vocal is an attempt at menacing, but it just doesn’t have the sort of teenaged misdirected anger that drives him in “Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back”–it’s like he’s trying to be a little more careful to make sure he stays on time and on pitch, and this song could use a bit more of a messy, over the top sound. His vocal is not bad by any means, but it’s just a bit too sedate.

The biggest problem with this song is that in its attempt to sound metal, it focuses so much on the its definitively metal rhythm and some fast, heavy guitars that it doesn’t let anything else really shine. Even the strings that are doing some interesting and dramatic things throughout are so buried in the mix that they are easy to ignore. To me it sounds like Steinman was trying out metal without really putting his own stamp on it, which may be a sign of where his writing would have gone if his health had held up longer.

Lyrically, there just isn’t much here. It keeps changing metaphors to say the same thing: “We take from the people and give to ourselves.” The first verse ends with “With that we/Can take and pocket/No one needs to know/We’re the plug/And they’re the socket/Give us the juice/And we’ll glow,” which is something of a tortured metaphor already but then gets joined by other metaphors like “They’re the victims/Waiting for their mugger” and overly straightforward statements like “If you stand in our way/Don’t stand in our way.” Some of the metaphors don’t really match this idea but they also don’t seem to fit with anything else. “We’re the trash collectors/’Cause they’re nothing but trash” sounds more like a bad wrestling heel than anything more meaningful, just saying, “Yeah, you can tell these are the bad guys, ’cause they call people trash.” It feels unpolished and messy.

Before getting to it here, I had not listened to this song in years, because I never liked it. It’s a little better than I remembered, but I still don’t like it. I can’t help but wonder if Steinman was experimenting and just hadn’t really gotten to the point where he fully understood the possibilities of metal as a sound yet, and it ends up being a pretty generic song that buries the most interesting elements (the strings and harps) underneath a pile of sludge. I wonder if he had been healthier longer if we would have had some more exploration of the metal sound that would have been more fruitful, but by this point in the timeline he was seemingly well into a physical decline.

Notes

• The pig squeals at the end are just . . . no.
• I would never in a million years have guessed Steve Vai was playing that solo. Meat Loaf loves bringing in guest stars on his latter-day albums, but sometimes they just don’t add anything, and this is one of those cases.
• For all that I don’t like the song, it definitely has an atmosphere, and that means it’s probably a more effective stage song than how it sounds.
• This is the last time Todd Rundgren is credited on this album, or with Meat Loaf. This part of the timeline, saying goodbye to some of the collaborators we’ve seen repeatedly over a three-decade journey, has some sad notes that don’t appear in the sound. Rundgren’s public profile faded into obscurity long ago, but he’s still recording and still experimenting. He never got the attention for his talents at so many different aspects of music that Prince or Frank Zappa got, but he is that kind of “I can do anything even remotely music-related” talent. Without him, it’s unlikely Bat out of Hell would ever have gotten off the ground, and who knows what, if anything, would have become of Meat Loaf and Steinman.
• Beyond the ways that I don’t like this as a song, I can’t help but think it seems awfully mustache-twirling for Batman villains. I have lamented the idea that we didn’t get the Steinman Batman: the Musical before, but maybe it would have upset me on two different fandom-levels.