Jim Steinman - Bad For Good (Reissue) (1981)

Jim Steinman didn't invent theatrical rock & roll, but it could be argued he perfected it. Steinman's solo discography may be meager -- he released just one album in his decades-long career, 1981's Bad for Good -- but his signature is indelible: bombastic melodies delivered with the melodrama of opera, the volume of arena rock, and the angst of teensploitation. No matter the singer, the overblown sound remained the same, all patterned after the songwriter's big breakthrough and magnum opus -- Meat Loaf's 1977 album Bat Out of Hell, a Springsteen homage polished by Todd Rundgren. Over the next 20 years, Meat Loaf and Steinman would reunite on occasion -- their big comeback arrived in 1993, with the explicit sequel Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell -- but the songwriter's signature lived on through other artists. Bonnie Tyler took "Total Eclipse of the Heart" into the charts in 1983, the same year that Air Supply had an adult contemporary hit with "Making Love Out of Nothing at All," while Celine Dion's first massive American hit came with "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" in 1996. Once the hits began to fade, Steinman split his time between production and writing, often circling back to Meat Loaf. The pair reunited for Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose in 2006, then, a decade later, Steinman turned his Bat songs into the jukebox musical Jim Steinman's Bat Out of Hell, bringing him to the Broadway stage, where he always belonged.
Born and raised in New York City, Steinman graduated from George W. Hewlett High School in 1965 and started to pursue a professional musical career in earnest while attending Amherst College in the late '60s. While he was an Amherst student, he composed music for the school's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's A Man's a Man in 1968; that same year, he performed a similar task for an adaptation of Brecht's Baal at the Island Theatre Workshop. During his final year at Amherst, Steinman wrote the musical The Dream Engine, which contained traces of the pop songs he'd later write...