On Mourning Jim Steinman

 As you probably know by now, at least if you follow me on social media, the world lost an amazing songwriter and storyteller on April 19. Jim Steinman was best known for writing all of the music and lyrics for Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell (the best selling album EVER with all music and lyrics written by a single person), as well as hits like “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” He also wrote Tanz der Vampire, Bat Out of Hell the Musical, and lyrics for Whistle Down the Wind. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and won a Grammy and the BMI Song of the Year (you want to Google that speech, by the way).

It’s very hard to explain how much more to me he was than that.

There are millions of stories out there by people who were blown away the first time they heard Bat Out of Hell. I’m not going to bore you with mine, except to say that it was one of those formative things for me, one of those things that I think we all have that just… make us feel seen and understood, and that fundamentally shape the way we see the world and our place in it. I loved the album from the minute-long instrumental intro, but it was the line “Nothing ever grows in this rotting old hole, and everything is stunted and lost, and nothing really rocks and nothing really rolls and nothing’s ever worth the cost” that told me that somebody out there understood how I felt about my small-town teenage existence, and “For Crying Out Loud”—the last song on the album and still my favorite song of all time (if I could only have one song on a desert island you can bet it’d be this one)—that sealed the deal.

From then I sought out everything Steinman I could, in as close to chronological order as possible. (I ended up hearing Bat 2 before Original Sin because the latter was hard to get outside the UK at the time, but I tried!)

I didn’t love all of it at first listen.

That feels like a really important thing, especially with his solo album, Bad For Good. If you look up Bad For Good you’ll see that the biggest complaints reviewers about it tend to be Steinman’s vocals and the spoken word segments.

I’m not going to lie, although I never would have said this when Jim was alive because I didn’t know him personally and don’t know how sensitive he was to criticism, but those are exactly the things that… almost embarrassed me, if that makes sense, the first time around. The way he growls “But you’ll never hide away from me” on the title track or screams out “I REMEMBER EVERYTHING!” at the beginning of the spoken word track “Love and Death and an American Guitar” reminded me of… of the kid who came to school rambling non-stop about this SUPER COOL THING they found that was cool to exactly no one else, or the kid who insisted on belting out Andrew Lloyd Webber songs at every talent show even though their voice was mediocre at best. In other words, they reminded me of… well, of me. And my first reaction was to be embarrassed by proxy at the sheer geekiness of it all.

That may sound like a bad thing. But it wasn’t. I think it was one of the big things that made Jim and his work more than just a fandom to me.

Because as time went on, I realized that it wasn’t really embarrassing. That “Love and Death and an American Guitar” was the SOUL of Jim’s body of work, and that it only seemed corny to have an over-the-top spoken word track on a rock album because the mainstream world had told me it was. I realized (even before Bat 3) that I wouldn’t take “Bad For Good” any other way, and that Jim’s “less than superhuman” vocals were PERFECT for the very, very human “Left in the Dark”.

And the intro to “Stark Raving Love” reused in “Holding Out for a Hero”? Again, I think my first reaction all those years ago was to wonder, why couldn’t he just write something new?

But the answer is, and always was, because that wasn’t what the song needed.

The album was exactly the way it was supposed to be. It just wasn’t what the music industry WANTED it to be.

So many of the things that I’m self-conscious about in my writing and in my life were things that Steinman flaunted. It had been so drilled into me by teachers and by Western media that I was supposed to be “original” (whatever the hell that is). I couldn’t write anything that was too clearly inspired by any of my fandoms. I wasn’t supposed to write the same thing twice. (That’s almost definitely why it has taken me so long to write this—the idea that I only get One Steinman Tribute, so it has to be perfect off the bat?) But here was Steinman, so clearly throwing Peter Pan and Wuthering Heights references into his work alongside references to his OTHER work. I loved it, but I didn’t know what to make of it.

I was, and still am, a little terrified to say “This is my work. It’s good. Take it or leave it, but I definitely think you should take it.” But that’s exactly what Jim did, throughout his entire career. “Yes, the song needs to be this long.” “Yes, it needs a motorcycle.” “Yes, spoken word belongs on a rock album and here is the punchline and isn’t it MAGNIFICENT.” Again, I didn’t know him in person. I don’t know if he was that confident—or cocky. But his work IS good. Every bit of it. Maybe especially the unconventional parts.

If you listen to him speak (out of character), he sounds like a geeky teenager, even into his 60s. I mean that with the utmost love, from a perennial geeky teenager myself. And yet, what he had to say resonated with MILLIONS of people. And so, that initial embarrassment I felt, that had long since turned to love and admiration, told me that maybe my geeky teenager words would resonate with someone too. And although I never had the chance to speak with him in person, I’ve never heard a single person who has say anything that indicates that he didn’t feel that way about his fans: that all of us matter.

One of the other big things I love about Jim is how he wrote about the really ugly stuff. Not always, of course. But he wrote about emotions with more layers than just “I love you” or “I’m sad you don’t love me.” The narrator of “Left in the Dark” knows his girlfriend/wife/whoever she is has been cheating, but he still says “don’t tell me now, I don’t need any answers tonight. I just need some love, so turn out the light and I’ll be left in the dark again.” Is that “problematic”? A failure to exercise self-care? Absolutely. But it’s also a very real and understandable emotion, one that a real person might actually feel. And that’s one of the biggest things I consciously took from him as an author. That characters don’t always have to do what’s right, as long as what they do feels real.

I should probably stop here and talk for a minute about the “ugliness” in my book, and how it’s inspired by Jim only (well, mostly) in the sense described above.

I wrote a book about an obsessive genius composer who has lost the physical ability to make music in the same way that he used to. Ever since I made the decision to publish, I’ve worried that people would mistakenly assume that that particular aspect of the character was inspired by Jim. It was not. I’ve never attempted to hide the fact that some of Rei’s “eccentric musician” quirks were inspired by Jim, and of course I couldn’t NOT make my genius composer character a classical piano-playing rock star, given that Jim and Yoshiki from X Japan are probably my two favorite composers ever. But I created the character and wrote the first draft in 2005, which was technically after the first of several strokes that Jim had, but before I or the general public knew about it. The general idea of “neglecting your own health for the sake of working way too hard on your music” probably came in PART from a couple of stories (about both Jim and Meat) from Meat Loaf’s autobiography, but also see Yoshiki above, Winslow from Phantom of the Paradise… and also a lot of that is just me. I ignore health problems and just hope they’ll go away a lot too.

What I did take from Jim was the idea of characters who do things you know aren’t good… that aren’t good for themselves, or for the people they love, but that the reader will look at and say “Damn, that’s messed up. But would I really do any better?”

So now that more specific stories are coming out about Jim’s health… I just want to say that, while life ended up imitating art in a LOT of ways related to this book, that particular similarity wasn’t done intentionally or with much knowledge on my part beyond the “wearing the same contact lenses for ten years” or whatever that possibly-not-even-true story was from decades ago.

Still, I think that’s tied up into a lot of the grief that I’m feeling. A lot of the anger and frustration at not being able to do everything you used to that I channeled into my writing did come from a family member, with whom I share genes, and whose health problems I might someday share. There’s definitely a lot of fear there, and there’s a lot of fear and regret associated with lyrics like “We’ll never be as young as we are right now.”

It’s scary, to see yourself getting older without having written an album or directed a movie or published a book that’s going to outlive you. It’s scary to wonder if the impact you’ve made on the world is a good one or not (or none at all). It’s scary to wonder if the best times are behind you. If you made the right choice not to go into debt for a vacation this year, or if by this time next year you’ll be unable to go, no matter how much money you’ve saved.

“You’ll have to pay for it later if you don’t get it when it’s going for free.”  That’s a Steinman lyric that used to haunt me about my first love. Now it haunts me a lot about career and creative prospects I’ve let get away. Maybe someday it’ll haunt me about my health. And I still don’t feel any older than 17.

So I think what I’ve been mourning isn’t just the life of a man I respected as an artist but also as a person. I think it’s tied really deeply into what Jim wrote, and who he was, and how he lived.

And in part, it’s maybe me. It’s maybe all those “younger than we are right now”s that will never come again. It’s all those nights with the windows open and Bad For Good blasting on the car stereo, or under the covers with tears streaming down my cheeks and “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” on repeat. Maybe I’m mourning that youth. Or just the pre-pandemic (pre-Trump, pre-9/11, pre-whatever it was for you) world.

And maybe I’m still trying to work out the message I’m going to take next from these songs that have literally shaped my life. What are they telling me to do? Where are they telling me to go?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the world is a better place for having had Jim Steinman in it… and so I’m trying not to mourn, but to celebrate his music, his warmth and kindness, and his badass attitude toward art and to life.

It might take me some time to get there… but I hope he’s looking down at me, and at all of us he’s touched, and seeing who his songs have made us, and feeling proud.