12 Most Overlooked Meat Loaf Songs From Every Album

The best single Meat Loaf single released between Dead Ringer in 1981 and his renaissance with the Bat Out Of Hell II album in 1993 was without a shadow of a doubt this absolute belter of a song.

And it’s almost forgotten about, coming as it did in the middle of that awkward creative trough where Meat Loaf was figuring out whether he still had a worthwhile career without Jim Steinman’s hand on the tiller. This and Midnight In The Lost And Found are pretty much the only two singles from this period that make it onto his many ‘best of…’ compilations, often dismissed as a couple of skippable anomalies between Bat Out Of Hell albums.

Written by Meat Loaf’s long time band leader Paul Jacobs and his wife Sarah Durkee, Modern Girl has all the touchstones of a classic ten-minute Meat Loaf histrionic pop opera classic, crammed into four-and-a-half glorious minutes of pop music.

There’s that roiling piano, the propulsive, galloping rhythm, the singer’s impassioned, full-throated yell over the top - but here it’s backed, not by a sultry big-voiced backing singer but a whole forest of them, a choir of voices laden with echo to produce what can only be described as gale-force gospel, giving the whole song an almost call-and-response feel.

As relatively short as Modern Girl is, the song still finds time to drop back for a quiet lull before kicking back in again for the barnstorming chorus once again. It’s a supremely confident single with one of Meat Loaf’s most assured vocals, released at a time when, arguably, he didn’t have that much to be confident about - which makes it all the more remarkable.