I hate to keep ragging on Meat Loaf’s voice on this album. He was 69. In interviews, he sounds like he even has a difficult time talking. In all reality, he probably shouldn’t have been in front of a microphone at all. I even suspect that he knew it.

On The Jonathan Ross Show in 2013 (at which point, his speaking voice does sound fine), Meat Loaf said that he planned to record two songs with Steinman and was trying to get one more. By the release of the album, a lot has changed: his voice sounds very different; he has announced his retirement from touring; he has asked Ellen Foley, Karla DeVito, and Lorraine Crosby all to appear on the album; Steinman seems to have been in poor health (though his intense privacy on the subject makes it difficult to tell); and the plan for the album is seemingly to record every Steinman song that hasn’t gotten a proper release before. I can’t help but wonder if Meat Loaf at some point had to recognize his own and Steinman’s mortality and just set himself to a sort of last testament, knowing that the pair probably did not have time to wait for Steinman to write an album of songs.

Closing the album is another song written for The Dream Engine. It opens with a drum-machine-synth-and-piano rhythm that sounds a little bit like the “Stark Raving Love”/”Holding out for a Hero” piano line watered down (though since this is earlier it’s probably more like those are this line on steroids). Some funky guitars join in with the vocals, on which Meat Loaf is backed by backing vocals for almost every note. The chorus adds some chunky rhythm guitars and some extra synth stings along with more wide-ranging backing vocals. The pattern repeats once and then it ends with a fade-out slide guitar solo from the album’s lone guest star, Rickey Medlocke.

This is one of the more straightforward rock songs in Steinman’s oeuvre, which is interesting coming from his early days working in theater. It’s structured essentially as verse-chorus-verse-chorus-outro, which isn’t dissimilar from the standard rock structure. It’s using drum machines and synthesizers pretty heavily, which gives it a decidedly ’80s feeling, but it otherwise is one of the closest examples there is to Steinman just writing a ’70s “classic rock” song. It doesn’t change keys; it doesn’t build much; it really establishes everything it’s doing in the first 30 seconds and then ends less than four minutes later.

Meat Loaf still doesn’t sound good here, but he doesn’t sound too bad. The backing vocals help cover up his weaknesses and he essentially sings one note for the entire song without ever needing to sustain much. It’s one of the better jobs on the album of covering up for his vocal problems.

Lyrically, there are hints of what Steinman will become as a lyricist, but it’s still relatively straightforward. It’s a teenager bragging about his plans to have sex with someone after much effort leading up to it by explaining that he will be a “train of love.” There are some lines about “Riding the train now/Can’t feel the pain now” and such that sound like they may be references to cocaine (which is often referred to as a “train”), and it’s difficult to tell if he’s going for the idea that both are involved here or he wants to set it up so that you think he’s talking about cocaine and it turns into sex. I think the latter may be more likely considering what his more mature lyrics like to do with subverting expectations, but it’s a guess.

It’s not a great song, but it’s fine. It’s a fairly fun little rock song that kind of feels like something Steinman would have written as a throwaway compared to his usual mini-operas. Maybe it’s not the obvious way for the Steinman-Meat Loaf pairing to go out, but in a way it’s appropriate: we’re still having fun and still rocking, in spite of or maybe even because of all that we’ve been through.

And with that, Meat Loaf essentially makes his exit from our story. He did do publicity for Jim Steinman’s Bat out of Hell: The Musical, including some really good interviews and statements about how important he knew it was to Steinman. He did tour more. He did act more. He announced plans to record more, but when he died in 2022, no recording was in progress.

Meat Loaf and Steinman had a tumultuous relationship. Meat Loaf would consistently claim that the tumult wasn’t real, but it seems like he’s the only person with that perception. Nonetheless, it really seems like they ended as friends, and both men recognized the debt they owed to one another.

From a Steinman fan’s perspective, Meat Loaf is a towering figure. There are six complete albums of Jim Steinman songs, and four of them were sung and credited to Meat Loaf. Meat Loaf’s renditions of Steinman’s songs almost always served as definitive recordings, and as much as that owes to the budget he and Steinman could get together and to Steinman having final say over the productions of almost everything, Meat Loaf’s presence definitely helped.

I have watched a lot of interviews and events related to Bat out of Hell, and one of the strongest senses that I get out of them is how socially intelligent Meat Loaf was. He and Steinman would sit for interviews together, but questions were almost always directed at Meat Loaf. He would know when to push the questions to Steinman, either because his friend was getting annoyed at the lack of attention or because it was about one of the subjects he cared about most, and he would know when to answer first because Steinman would otherwise say something that would get them in trouble. When Steinman was giving a stock answer, he would often disappear to talk to other members of the band. He seems to have fostered a real sense of camaraderie among the players at that point, and that’s probably a big part of why so many of them stuck around through the years.

I think of Jim Steinman as the genius behind this work, but there is definitely an extent to which we would never have gotten it without Meat Loaf. Maybe they weren’t always as close as Meat Loaf makes it sound, but for Steinman, Meat Loaf was definitely more than just another singer.