Jim Steinman: My Biggest Influence
I've been called over the top. How silly. If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side. – Jim Steinman
The Mysterious J. Steinman
Music in the mid Noughties wasn’t great.
Don’t believe me?
Crazy Frog was Number 1 for four weeks in the UK in the summer of 2005.
And I loved music.
I had also been moved into my brother’s old bedroom, in which he’d left, quite frankly, the vast majority of his belongings behind.
Including his tapes and CDs.
With far too much time on my hands as a twelve-year-old in 2004, I obviously started to make my way through them. Hello to Madonna’s Immaculate Collection (emphasis on the ‘immaculate’), Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, too much Dire Straits but needs must.
But every now again, I’d pick up an album that had a track on it which was familiar, because it had very much been a hit when it was released. But those tracks had something else in common: a sweeping romanticism, an epic sense of urgency, a wry, sometimes juvenile sense of humour if you listened to the lyrics closely enough.
And so I started looking at the booklets that came with these tapes and CDs, discovering that every single one of those tracks was written by a mysterious ‘J. Steinman’.
Bear in mind that this was pre-broadband days in the UK, so just Googling him took a minute, but essentially I started my own little investigation. What else had he written, besides ‘It’s All Coming Back to me Now’ and any Bonnie Tyler or Meat Loaf song you could name?
I eventually discovered he’d recorded his own album. He’d even put together a sort-of concept album for a kind-of girl group. It was so hard to find the latter that my mum had to telephone HMV to ask them to order in a copy.
And everything I found that belonged to J. Steinman made me fall in love with his music even more.
There was an ambition and a restlessness and an intensity of feeling to his music that spoke to this restless, ambitious teenager with some very intense feelings going on – not to mention a real campness to proceedings (we’ve all seen the Total Eclipse of the Heart video).
That was twenty years ago, by the way.
To put it in perspective:
· Jim Steinman is the only human being to whom I’ve ever sent fan mail.
· I like a grand total of three musicals. He was involved in two of them. The other one’s Fiddler on the Roof because I’m that much of a cliché.
· I have five permanent playlists on my Spotify: Running, Christmas, Now! That’s What I Call Coldharbour, Coldharbour Vibes…
And Jim Steinman.
Born a day after Halloween
James Richard Steinman was born into a Jewish New York family on the 1st of November 1947 (although, in my opinion, he really should’ve been born the day before). He nearly flunked out of college on account of really not being great at STEM, but managed to hang on by devising and producing musicals for extra credit. This brought him to the attention of the great Joseph Papp of ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ fame and essentially, it seemed that Jim would have a great career writing musicals and film music. But then in 1973, he met Meat Loaf at an audition and the rest was history.
Their working relationship was, uh, complicated to say the least, but the fact is, Meat Loaf’s most successful albums are the ones that Jim wrote. When Meat Loaf couldn’t (both physiologically and psychologically) record the second album Jim wrote, Jim released it himself and being a Bad for Good fan really makes me feel like the Tobias Fünke ‘there are dozens of us’ meme.
But I’d still argue that Jim truly became successful in the Eighties when he wasn’t really working with Meat, as he made a name for himself collaborating with others, including Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow, and The Sisters of Mercy. In fact, he was so successful in the mid-Eighties that Air Supply’s ‘Making Love out of Nothing at All’ (which he wrote) was kept off the Number 1 spot by…
‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ (which he wrote).
Highlights in the Nineties (ignoring the obvious Bat Out of Hell II) include Celine Dion’s version of It’s All Coming Back to me Now (still her biggest hit after My Heart Will Go On), working with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Whistle Down the Wind (Boyzone’s No Matter What? That’s a Steinman), and at the turn of the century, the aforementioned musical Der Tanz der Vampire.
Sadly, Jim then had various health problems, although he finally managed to stage his life’s ambition, Jim Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell: The Musical, before he died in 2021.
You might not know his name, but you know his songs
Bad For Good – Jim Steinman (YouTube/Spotify)
Bat out of Hell – Meat Loaf (YouTube/Spotify)
Good Girls Go to Heaven (But Bad Girls Go Everywhere) – Pandora’s Box (YouTube/Spotify)
Holding out for a Hero – Bonnie Tyler (YouTube/Spotify)
I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) – Meat Loaf (YouTube/Spotify)
It’s All Coming Back to me Now – Celine Dion (YouTube/Spotify)
Making Love out of Nothing At All – Air Supply (YouTube/Spotify)
More – The Sisters of Mercy (YouTube/Spotify)
Tonight Is What It Means to be Young – Fire Inc. (YouTube/Spotify)
Total Eclipse of the Heart – Bonnie Tyler (YouTube/Spotify)
Long songs and even longer titles: Coldharbour
I’m often asked about my influences when it comes to writing and obviously, I have many literary ones. But really, it all comes back to Jim. I would describe my approach to Coldharbour as if Jim Steinman and Shirley Jackson had a baby that was brought up on the Thames Estuary.
I like to think that, like a good Steinman song, my writing is both funny and earnest: the atmosphere is intense and epic, with big emotions and windswept settings, where everything feels like life and death even when it’s not.
And fun fact: the chapter titles in Coldharbour I are all snippets of Steinman lyrics, so here’s an exclusive reveal of the first five chapter titles:
Stronger than Real Life
What it Means to be Young
Lost Long Ago
A Piece of the Night
A Shot in the Dark
And don’t forget…
If the thrill is gone, then it's time to take it back.
Bonus video: Jim talking about writing Bat out of Hell
RIP James Richard Steinman, 1st November 1947 – 19th April 2021
