Once again plundering the early Steinman catalogue, here we get a cover of a song written for the musical that became More than You Deserve, the show that first united Meat Loaf and Steinman in 1973. One of the sad elements of Braver than We Are is that it has to cull so much from Steinman’s history, which makes it clear how little he’s written in this century. The bridge for “Speaking in Tongues” is really the only thing written for this album, and the most recently written material otherwise here is what was written for the Batman and Cry-Baby musicals more than a decade before this album’s release. Steinman was constantly re-writing and tinkering with older work, and much of what appeared here had not been released commercially before, so reasonable minds can differ on how much is really “new.” Still, it is painfully evident that he hasn’t written much lately.

The song opens with a doubled saxophone line playing a bluesy melodic line. (And I’ve never quite been able to place it, but I swear that I recognize it as matching the melody from something else.) They disappear, and a soft synth line joins a bluesy piano as Meat Loaf’s voice joins in. After a couple of lines, the saxophones are back. After that, the sound doesn’t change much, with the saxophones cutting out in softer sections and then taking over for louder moments. There are quite a few high-pitched backing vocals behind Meat Loaf, but it’s still subdued compared to what we’ve usually seen from Steinman.

Structurally, this song is just not a pop song at all–there are repeating phrases and musical ideas, but there is nothing identifiable as a traditional chorus. It definitely has a “bigger” part and a “smaller,” but it doesn’t really have the step-up build to a repeated chorus that makes a pop song what it is.

While some moments are clearly remnants of being written for the odd More than You Deserve musical (like the line “Take my baby/Show her a real good time”), the lyrics are unquestionably Steinman. Not only is this the origin of “You’ve been cold to me so long/I’m cryin’ icicles instead of tears,” but it’s a complex breakup song. He tells her to leave, and she says it’s not fair to throw her out with nothing, so he tells her to take some souvenirs, suggesting his heart, his soul, his mind, his master, his slave, his body, and his grave but that his love is “mine, all mine.” It’s relatively easy to see this as the embryonic version of what eventually became “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.”

Perhaps the most surprising part of this song is actually not that it’s basically a slow blues song but rather Meat Loaf’s voice–it’s using a lower register of his voice than is typical, and that helps, but he actually sounds decent throughout this song, even in the moments when it gets up a bit higher. The emotional delivery is excellent, displaying a mixture of resignation, frustration, sad, and anger, as the lyrics suggest. I would not have guessed from the rest of this album that Meat Loaf still had this level of performance in him.

“Souvenirs” is fine and could be great if you like blues and musicals since it relies heavily on those two sounds instead of the Wagnerian rock of most of Steinman’s work. Perhaps it’s telling that the most successful song on the first half of this album is the one that sounds least like what Steinman and Meat Loaf have performed at their best, but at least it does generally work.