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I’m looking for Steinman related videos in European PAL format, and rare music by Jim Steinman.
Please e-mail me if you have something I might be interested in.

 Each song rated from 1-10 (only songs written by Steinman). These are just my opinions. Feel free to disagree!

Bat Out of Hell

Great album though some songs sound a bit too much like ordinary rock'n'roll. The production (by Todd Rundgren) is good but the album might be even better if it was produced by Steinman himself. The band (Rundgren, Roy Bittan, Edgar Winter and others) is great.It’s actually a quite diverse album: there’s rock and roll (All Revved Up, Paradise), progressive rock (Bat Out of Hell), perfect pop (You Took the Words), country (Two Out of Three) and almost classical music (Heaven Can Wait, For Crying Out Loud). Paradise is considered as a major piece of work. I think it's a bit overrated, the lyrics are good but the music isn’t Jim at his best. Heaven Can Wait is the most beautiful song Jim has ever written. The arrangement is amazing. Meat Loaf sounds very young and innocent, maybe better than on any other song. For Crying Out Loud is another beautiful and spiritual song.

Dead Ringer

An underrated album completely written by Steinman. It's not completely produced by Jim though, and the production isn't very good on some songs. People usually say that Meat's voice was very bad on this album. Maybe but it doesn't really bother me. The song Dead Ringer for Love features incredible vocal performances from both Meat and Cher. I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Back is a real lost gem. I think the lyrics of Everything Is Permitted are a bit too militant (“All our enemies will soon be stone cold dead). The album features two truly great guitarists: Davey Johnstone (from Elton John’s band) and Mick Ronson (from David Bowie’s Spiders of Mars).

Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell

Most of these songs had been previously recorded by Steinman or Pandora's Box. Some of them sound better than original versions, some don't.For me Meat’s version of R&R Dreams is much better than Jim’s while Jim’s  of Out of the Frying Pan and Pandora’s Box’s Good Girls are slightly better than Meat’s. The both versions of It Just Won’t Quit are amazing.  Wasted Youth is the same as Love and Death and an American Guitar but somehow it fits this album better than Bad for Good, as well as the beautiful lullaby Lost Boys and Golden Girls as the closing track of the album. Life Is a Lemon and Everything Louder are the heaviest songs Steinman has written. Jim said that his favorite part of the album is the “what about... it’s defective” thing in Life Is a Lemon. I think so too. It’s suprising how well Jim’s happiest song (Out of the Frying Pan) works after his darkest song (It Just Won’t Quit.)

Bad Attitude

Welcome to the Neighbourhood

Live Around the World

Recorded in various locations 1977-96. A good but not great live album. The only surprises are the songs not written by Jim: What You See Is What You Get (from Stoney and Meatloaf) and Hot Patootie (from the Rocky Horror Show). Jim recites Wasted Youth (sounding awful), and plays the piano on Heaven Can Wait and Objects in the Rear View Mirror. Objects is the best track on this album, it sounds even better than on Bat II. Meat doesn’t seem to like surprises in the setlist. Does he even remember that the two Bats aren’t his only albums, and that there’s some great stuff on the other albums (I’ll Kill You If You Don’t Come Back)?
   I don’t usually like live albums. The problem is that usually the concert atmosphere is lost on the record. When you make a live album, the songs shouldn’t be from several concerts, and no editing or remixing should be done in the studio. Making new song arrangements can sometimes be good. There are  a few (non-Steinman related) live albums I’d like to recommend:
Live Killers by Queen: Listening to this you can really feel you were watching the band play live.
Moonlighting by Van Dyke Parks: The arrangements are completely new and often better than in the original versions. There’s some funny chitchat between the songs.

The Very Best of

How many hitsbestofandfriends albums has Meat actually released? Do we really need this one?
The interesting thing about this one are the new songs. Kiss, Home by Now and No Matter What are composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and written by Steinman, and they are from Whistle Down the Wind. A Kiss is also on the Songs from Whistle album which was released at the same time. Home by Now was originally only a piece of sung dialogue. Jim's production makes it sound like a real song. No Matter What is a really beautiful song, a bit like Heaven Can Wait and Lost Boys. It's hard to say which version of it is better, Meat or Boyzone. Is Nothing Sacred is composed by Steinman and written by Don Black. It's not hard to tell that it was originally written for Celine Dion. The melody is quite catchy, first I thought it sounded too much like Diane Warren (not meaning that Warren hasn’t written some good songs too) but the more I listen to it, the better it sounds. Don Black has written some great lyrics but this time he definitely wasn’t at his best. The song is not produced by Jim but another well known and talented producer Russ Titelman (Randy Newman, Brian Wilson, Eric Clapton).

Storytellers

Would be just another live album without the storytelling between the songs. For more storytelling you should read Meat’s memoires To Hell and Back, a very interesting book actually. For a rather intimate gig like this it would have been better include more piano ballads and less rock songs. As I said, I’m usually not crazy about live albums. So for me the most interesting song on the album was the single version of Is Nothing Sacred in the end. Why only a very short excerpt of I’d Love to Be as Heavy as Jesus? The most interesting live track was More than You Deserve because I wasn’t expecting to hear it on this album. I heard that Meat has done the rare Dream Engine song Who Needs the Young on his Storytellers tour. Why isn’t it on this album?
   If you want to see what the Storytellers series is at its best, you should watch David Bowie’s gig. It was a great selection of new and old songs, hits and rarities, and of course interesting storytelling.

All text and images © Robert Storm except where otherwise noted. (Pandora in the buttons painted by John William Waterhouse). Ask my permission if you want to use something.