![]() ![]() The Diane Warren-penned lead single “I’d Lie for You (And That’s the Truth)” is little more than an ostentatious wink in the direction of “I’d Do Anything for Love,” right down to the thinly-veiled quote of the other song’s melody in its opening piano part. For the rest of the album, Welcome to the Neighborhood can’t quite decide what it wants to be. Like on Back Into Hell, the first track sets the tone, and in this case the tone is an odd mix: “When the Rubber Meets the Road,” written by Meat’s longtime collaborators Paul Jacobs and Sarah Durkee, opens with a Steinman-aping piano line and some cinematic sound effects before settling awkwardly into a workmanlike hard rock riff. Less successful, both artistically and commercially, was Meat Loaf’s largely Steinman-less 1995 follow-up Welcome to the Neighborhood. Needless to say, it also sold a ridiculous number of copies. Its commitment to excess, from the CD-filling 75-minute runtime to the laboriousness of the metaphors in tracks like “Life is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back,” is awe-inspiring. Still, like its predecessor, Back Into Hell overcomes rational critique through sheer aesthetic will to power. Bat Out of Hell isn’t for everyone in the best of times but hearing Meat Loaf sententiously sing the automobile side mirror safety warning on the 10-minute-long “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer than They Are” is likely to test the resolve of even the most committed apologist. ![]() Along with these “director’s cut” versions of older tracks are new songs that, even more than is typical in Steinman’s oeuvre, teeter precariously on the edge of self-parody. Also reworked from Bad for Good is “Wasted Youth,” originally titled “Love and Death and an American Guitar”: a reprise of the theatrical introduction from “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” that sounds like the product of an unholy union between Jim Morrison and Andrew Lloyd Webber. ![]() Meat’s versions predictably put the originals to shame, his formidable pipes making Steinman’s recordings sound like demo guide vocals. Steinman raids his back catalog even more literally for “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” and “Out of the Frying Pan (And Into the Fire),” both of which hail from the composer’s 1981 solo album Bad for Good. ![]() Far from sanding away the rough edges of the Bat Out of Hell formula, Back Into Hell is as lurid and preposterous an album as its predecessor-sometimes even more so.įor evidence, one need look no further than Bat II’s opening track and biggest hit, the deathless adult contemporary ballad “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).” Stretching to a grandiose 12 minutes in the album version, the song presents a kind of capsule summary of the original Bat Out of Hell: from the lengthy motorcycle-revving introduction to the coda, where Meat Loaf and guest Lorraine Crosby channel his dialogic duet with Ellen Foley from “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” More than any other track, “I’d Do Anything for Love” justifies the notion of a Bat sequel it’s the first album turned up to 11 and unleashed on a market primed for its excess by 10 years of ensuing Steinman productions like Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Yet while Bat II shares a backward-looking sensibility with contemporary sequel-albums like Neil Young’s Harvest Moon, it also sets itself apart with its sheer audacity. It was a masterpiece.īy the same token, Bat’s belated sequel-1993’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell-feels like a product of its own time: the early ‘90s, when middle-aged rock acts from the Rolling Stones to the Eagles emerged from the inhospitable wilds of the previous decade to revisit past glories for nostalgia-hungry audiences. It was an affront to good sense and good taste, savaged by “serious” critics even as it sold a ridiculous number of copies. A pop-operatic fever dream seemingly fueled by equal parts cocaine and hubris, Bat upped the bombastic ante on Born to Run-era Springsteen and “Bohemian Rhapsody”-era Queen, making even the sonic excesses of a Bob Ezrin production seem minimalist by comparison. Bat Out of Hell, the 1977 debut by singer Meat Loaf and composer Jim Steinman, was the kind of project that could only have emerged in the late ‘70s. ![]()
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