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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!
 

Yvonne Elliman

Food of Love

The first recorded Steinman song. Doesn’t sound like his other songs but is very good anyway. I wish Jim produced a new version of it. Elliman is a good singer.

Karla de Vito

Is This a Cool World or What

Oh dear... the most beautiful song ever written sounds like an average soft rock ballad. Too fast and too loud. The only good thing about the arrangement is the backing vocals. Karla de Vito is a good singer anyway.

Air Supply

Greatest Hits

I used to say that the singer's bad but it's probably just because Air Supply is something you're supposed to hate. Actually I kind of like the singer's clean and emotionless voice. The production is better than on Bonnie's version.

Barry Manilow

Greatest Hits III

Better production than on Meat's version but I don’t like Manilow’s singing.

Barbra Streisand

Emotion

A very beautiful voice and a very beautiful version. Perhaps not as strong as the original version.

The Sisters of Mercy

Vision Thing

The music of this song is by Andrew Eldritch and music by Eldritch/Steinman. It’s a great song but both Jim and Andrew have written better songs. The Sisters of Mercy has become one of my favorite bands. Their goth rock is beautiful and dramatic.

Steinman has also produced two songs for their album Floodland. That albums a real masterpiece, and probably the most wagnerian rock album ever. Those songs, Dominion/Mother Russia and This Corrosion, may be Jim’s best productions of songs he didn’t write. Some other great productions were Never Forget by Take That and In the Dark of the Night from the movie Anastasia.

Celine Dion

Falling into You

Dion's version of It's All Coming Back to Me Now sounds mostly the same as the Pandora's Box version, it's just not as good. I simply don’t like her voice as much as Elaine Caswell’s.

There’s two other Steinman productions on this album. River Deep Mountain High is a synthesized version of the Ike and Tina Turner classic. It sounds magnificent but adds almost nothing to the original production which is  by Phil Spector. Call the Man isn’t isn’t one of Jim’s best productions either but the song (written by Andy Hill and Pete Sinnfield) is good.
Jim was also listed as an additional producer on a pretty good song called Us on Dion’s album Let’s Talk About Love. So what does being an additional producer mean? My guess is that Jim produced the original version of the song but it was newly recorded Humberto Gatica as the producer. There still was something remaining from the original version so Jim was called the additional producer.

Cecilia Vennersten

Cecilia Vennersten

I heard somebody say that "it's great but unfortunately it's in Swedish". I don't think there’s  anything unfortunate about this. We've all heard the song in English so why not listen to it in Swedish sometimes. I like listening to songs in different languages. Cecilia’s voice sounds beautiful and very young. The Swedish lyrics maybe aren’t as strong as the original but they sound very good. Some parts have been translated straight from the original but not all.

Virve Rosti

Tunnen sen täysillä taas

It's not bad but who needs it? Probably only the people who don't understand English. When I hear this song and Lämnad i mörkret, it's not hard for me to understand why the Swedes have had lots of international hits, and none of the Finnish artists have had more than minor cult success outside Finland. (Remember that I'm from Finland.) The Finnish translation (by Rosti) is quite good. It’s not a straight translation but there are some things that sound like Steinman though they aren’t in the original lyrics. Making a translation from English to Finnish is much more difficult than from English to Swedish. Swedish and English languages are both Germanic Indoeuropean languages while there’s no kinship between Finnish and other European languages except Hungarian and Estonian. Finnish words are long and the accent is always on the first syllable.

New Symphonic Orhestra

Plays Celine Dion

Ladies and gentlemen, this is it: The worst recorded version of a Steinman song. It’s less than three minutes (about 5,30 shorter than the original version). The melody is of course great but the arrangement makes it sound like some kind of elevator music. There’s none of the power of the original version. Despite the name New Symphonic Orchestra, it’s not a symphony orchestra that plays on this album, it’s mostly synthesizers. Very cheap sounding synthesizers.
There’s also a version of the same song played with panflute. Unfortunately I haven’t heard it but I’d love to. Even worse than this? I doubt it because there’s even some synthesized panflute in this version.

WWF All Stars

The Wrestling Album

It’s a quite nice instrumental version of Ravishing. World Wildlife Fund All Stars??? I think that on this album WWF means some wrestling thing (actually I couldn’t care less). I do know that Hulk Hogan is that wrestler who did a funny cameo role in Gremlins II.

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

Plain Dirt Fashion

A rather boring country version.

Dave Willet

?

Willetts has a strong musical voice which does justice to the song. At the moment I like listening to this even better than Meat’s version.

Nicki French

Secrets

A quite silly disco version produced by Stock/Aitken/Waterman. For some reason it was a hit though Nicki French isn’t a bad singer. Jim didn’t have anything to do with the production but some time ago he signed her for his Ravenous Records.

Jam Tronik

?

Another disco version, it turns the big piece of work into a happy pop song. Somehow it reminds me of one of my favorite Pet Shop Boys songs, I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing. I’m sure a lot of Steinman fans loathe this but I actually enjoy it. Silly? Most certainly. Entertaining? Very.

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.