One of the things Jim Steinman is most known for his the sheer length of his songs. Many stretch to eight minutes or more, with a handful [perhaps most notable “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”] reaching double-digit minutes in length. So, when one of his songs clocks in under two minutes, it’s quite a shock.

Steinman explained how it happened by saying that “If It Ain’t Broke Break It” was actually the bridge to this song and Meat Loaf had cut it down to just that part for Bat out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose. Combine those two parts and you have close to seven minutes of song, which is more like a typical Steinman song.

There is really nothing to this song except Justin Avery on the piano and Meat Loaf’s vocal. It does have a weird heavily electronic vocal passage at the very end that clearly leads into the first vocal notes of the next song and so should probably really be treated as part of that one, but otherwise there is absolutely nothing else.

The piano line is pretty enough, a surprisingly un-rhythmic sound for Steinman but one that really does convey the aching mood of the lyrics. It’s tough to tell about the melody, because Meat Loaf just isn’t actually singing one.

Meat Loaf is trying to sound like he’s in excruciating pain. He actually sounds like that in a number of other places on this album with his ragged 69 year old voice, but I don’t really get pain out of this one. To me, he sounds off-key and off-rhythm. It almost sounds to me like each syllable was recorded separately and then they were haphazardly slapped together at the end, which is not what happened. It just doesn’t work. At all.

The lyrics are interesting but perhaps a bit too dense. We open with “There are things I have come to believe/Since the new resurrection of love,” saying that it’s only since finding new love that the singer has learned certain things. It really just says the same thing a couple more times in different ways before saying, “There are endless nights/They just go on forever/There are scars on scars/That I know will never heal.” It’s only now that he realizes how much it hurts. He could convince himself that he didn’t before, but now that he’s feeling love again, he realizes the scars of his past relationships. The ending of “There’s relentless pain/It tortures me forever/I’ve got to pretend it ain’t real/But at least it only hurts/At least it only hurts/Only when I feel” is a heartbreaking and powerful cry of someone needing to hide their emotions in order to avoid pain.

In the vein of “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” being the complex emotions of a pained person who can’t fully commit to a new relationship, this song is more complicated than it sounds at first. The scars of his past are only visible when he is finding a new love. Put it together with “If It Ain’t Broke Break It” and a picture emerges of someone who feels a need for self-sabotage in order to avoid feeling the pain of his past. It doesn’t come across as the angry or villainous song that “If It Ain’t Broke Break It” does on its own–it comes across as an intense depression.

I can’t really claim to like this song, but the lyrics are impressively deep for its length. I haven’t seen anyplace where I can hear how this and “If It Ain’t Broke Break It” were supposed to fit together, but I can see in the lyrics how that would work, even if the music seems like it’s from two different worlds.