Meat Loaf’s Last Top 40 Hit Came Didn’t Include His Most Trusted Collaborator

Meat Loaf didn’t tend to release music that anyone would consider run-of-the-mill. It makes sense that his career trajectory was also off the beaten path, especially when it came to his occasional dalliances with the pop charts.

The way that his chart run ended also strayed from the norm. His last Top 40 hit came with a song that may have sounded like his previous smashes. But it didn’t include his regular musical partner in crime.

Meat and Jim

You could make the argument that Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman needed each other to reach the heights that both achieved. Meat needed Steinman’s grand, gothic song structures to showcase his emotionally potent bellows. And Steinman’s compositions required somebody like Meat to render his go-for-the-throat compositions with humanity and heart.

Alas, the two men, both equipped with powerful personalities to match their musical sensibilities, often clashed. One wonders how much more the pair could have accomplished together if they had worked together a bit more steadily throughout the years.

Even though Meat Loaf rarely stopped working, even overcoming serious vocal problems at times, his impact on Top 40 radio could be boiled down to two brief windows. There was his striking debut with Bat Out Of Hell in 1977, and then the sequel to that album, which arrived 16 years later.

After ‘Bat’

Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell reestablished the unique chemistry of Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman. Filled with elongated song titles and lyrics that stomped on subtlety with metal spikes, the album in many ways outdid the first Bat Out Of Hell from a commercial standpoint. It topped the American album charts and produced a No. 1 single in “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)”.

The obvious move would have been for the pair to stick together and try to rev it up again. But that didn’t happen. Meat Loaf’s follow-up album, Welcome To The Neighbourhood, contained just two Jim Steinman tracks. And Steinman had written both years before for other projects.

It’s hard to say why they didn’t try to recapture the success of Bat II. Steinman wasn’t known for working quickly, so it’s possible that he couldn’t come up with another full album’s worth of material in that short period. In any case, Meat Loaf worked with a bunch of other songwriters, including a proven hitmaker who spurred him to one more Top 40 song.

A Beautiful “Lie”

If Meat Loaf wasn’t going to have Jim Steinman at his disposal, he couldn’t have chosen much better than Diane Warren if he wanted a dramatic power ballad. Warren had proven herself time and again in that category. She was at the peak of her writer-for-hire era in 1995 when Meat Loaf came calling.

She wrote several songs for Welcome To The Neighbourhood, including the lead single “I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)”. From the parenthetical title to the piano chords that quoted “I’d Do Anything For Love)” to the back-and-forth with a female vocalist (Patti Russo), the song purposefully tried to recapture some of the Loaf/Steinman vibes. And it worked to the extent that it reached No. 13 on the pop charts.

That was it for Meat Loaf in terms of Top 40 singles. He and Steinman worked together again sporadically, most notably on Braver Than We Are, Loaf’s final album in 2016. Theirs was a partnership that was hard to emulate, although that last Meat Loaf hit did a pretty decent job of it.

Photo by Jo Hale/Redferns