12 Most Overlooked Meat Loaf Songs From Every Album
6. Welcome To The Neighbourhood (1995) - Left In The Dark
Remember that Bat Out Of Hell sequel that never was?
The original plan had been for the players on the original record to reconvene to try to duplicate the magic - and the sound - when Meat Loaf came off the road. The only problem was, Meat Loaf's tour (amongst other things) had taken a tremendous physical and emotional toll on the singer. To hear Steinman tell it, "he had lost his voice, he had lost his house, and he was pretty much losing his mind."
Steinman, not wanting to waste time while his muse was recovering, began putting the album together in the studio - but when Meat Loaf returned, ready to get back to work, he wanted nothing to do with the songs Steinman had so painstakingly created for their sophomore release together. The big man was always far more sensitive than his huge public persona ever let on, and having just come out of a long dark night of the soul he refused to sing the songs written during that time.
Unwilling to just junk the entire session, Steinman would end up finishing the abandoned album and releasing it under his own name as Bad For Good. One of those songs on that album was Left In The Dark, a heartrending ballad, lush with orchestral swooning, about a cuckolded man waiting for his unfaithful woman to come home to their bed.
Steinman’s version was beautifully constructed, but his voice wasn’t up to it. A few years later, he donated the song to Barbra Streisand, who released it as the lead single from her Emotion album. Her voice, of course, was up to it - but it hadn’t been written for her.
Meat Loaf finally got his hands on it in the mid-nineties and his version is huge, recreated as the massive, histrionic power ballad it was always meant to be. Aday didn’t have Streisand’s range, but he didn’t need it: he was goddamn Meat Loaf, and he threw himself into the character at the heart of the song like a lemming off a cliff.
It’s rare for a Jim Steinman song to be so nakedly vulnerable, but Left In The Dark, stripped of his usual tongue-in-cheek wordplay and Peter Pan obsession, is a masterpiece of heartbreak, and Meat Loaf milks it for all he’s worth.