12 Most Overlooked Meat Loaf Songs From Every Album

5. Couldn't Have Said It Better (2003) - Couldn’t Have Said It Better

Between 1995’s Welcome To The Neighbourhood and 2003's Couldn't Have Said It Better, Meat Loaf toured, released yet another greatest hits compilation, did some quality acting work (most notably in David Fincher’s seminal Fight Club) and got divorced after 22 years of marriage.

This last might have been the catalyst for going back into the studio without Steinman again, given how much of his fortune he would have shared following the split: he and Steinman had, after all, been working on new material for the proposed Bat Out Of Hell III record since 2001. However, legal issues between the two (or more specifically, between the managers and legal teams that represented each of them) also got in the way of a harmonious working relationship.

Whatever the case, Couldn’t Have Said It Better went ahead with a collection of non-Steinman collaborators, Diane Warren and Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue foremost among them. And unusually for a Meat Loaf record with no Jim Steinman songs, the album is great: if not quite up there with his best, certainly in the same league and knocking it out of the park.

Man Of Steel (his duet with daughter Pearl), Testify and Tear Me Down are all on a par with his best material, but the title track is something else. Sixx’s spritely reinterpretation of the classic songwriting that people saw as synonymous with Meat Loaf’s name, it sounds like what might happen if Steinman had ever allowed himself to be carried kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself is a delirious, infectious sprint around a pantomime stage, a warm, catchy song about two lovers who, mired by constant misunderstanding, decide to just shut the hell up and let their bodies do the talking. It’s completely brilliant.

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Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.