Last modified on Thu 22 Apr 2021 13.31 EDT
His own website described him as “The Lord of Excess”, and the Los Angeles Times dubbed him “the Richard Wagner of Rock and Roll”. Jim Steinman, who has died of kidney failure aged 73, made a spectacular career of being bigger and more bombastic than the rest, and his achievement in masterminding Meat Loaf’s album Bat Out of Hell will guarantee his immortality.
Bat ... has sold more than 50m copies since its 1977 release. It is the original and best showcase for Steinman’s mixture of extended multipart song structures, beyond-operatic production, and lyrics in which teen angst is inflated to berserk dimensions. Bat’s producer, Todd Rundgren, thought the album was supposed to be a parody of Bruce Springsteen – members of Springsteen’s E Street Band played on it – and Steinman did not entirely reject parallels with the Boss. His own songs, Steinman said, “are dream operatic, his are street operatic. He’s more West Side Story and I’m more Clockwork Orange.” He added that he conceived his albums as “musical films on record”. Such was Steinman’s estimation of himself as the complete auteur that, while the album was nominally by Meat Loaf, he insisted on the front cover credit “Songs by Jim Steinman”, a virtually unique feat for a songwriter.