Meat Loaf’s Greatest Songs: A Dozen of His Best-Remembered or Most Unfairly Overlooked Tracks
variety.comA.D. Amorosi When powerhouse vocalist-actor Meat Loaf eulogized composer-producer Jim Steinman last April in Rolling Stone, the singer – who died Thursday at age 74 – said of his “Bat Out of Hell” partner, “We belonged heart and soul to each other.
We didn’t know each other. We were each other.”Meat Loaf (born Marvin Lee Aday) could not have stated the obvious better, as each man’s operatic, oversized talents were only matched by their level of grand theatricality, with thundering melodicism and melodramatic lyricism at the top of the list of their skill sets.The best Meat Loaf songs – even those without Steinman’s tower-toppling compositions – come on in an epic, adrenalized rush.
Even when singing a power ballad, Meat Loaf was loud and brazenly and heartbrokenly emotive. Here are some of the most dramatic and impactful of Meal Loaf’s musical moments: Stoney & Meatloaf, “What You See is What You Get” (1971) What’s fascinating about Meat Loaf (stylized as one word this early in the game) at his start is that you could sense his might, his soulful immenseness as a vocalist, bumping against the walls of this quintessentially ’70s Southern-fried bit of psychedelia.
The Stoney & Meatloaf pairing made one album for the Motown label’s subsidiary, Rare Earth, that has gone sadly ignored in Meat’s canon.
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