Everything Louder Than Everything Else

Close your eyes. Imagine you’re a kid again and you’re sat on the backseat of the family car. What song is playing? If you said Meat Loaf, then you’re in good company.

Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, or Bat II as we’ll call it, was a behemoth that dominated the album charts across the world, particularly in the UK. The lead single, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”, is the apex power ballad of a generation, vast in scope, scale, and ambition. Michael Bay directed the videos for the three singles released from this album, which was incredible in the 90s and almost unthinkable today.

Bat II is the moment we started to understand that music existed as part of collections called albums. Rather than just being individual songs that you heard on the radio or the car stereo, there were threads in each song that artists used to weave them into a narrative. Of course, we didn’t use words like narrative then, we just understood that it was better to hear the album in full rather than in parts.

The curtain rises to the sound of motorcycle engine revs, a nod to Bat Out of Hell, surely, as “I’d Do Anything…” comes to life. As soon as the piano takes over it is clear that this is going to be a song like few others. It is a love song given the Steinman treatment, the protagonist explains the things he would and would not do for his love.

The album version clocks in at just over twelve minutes and the radio edit just under eight minutes. That this Norse saga of a song ever got any airtime let alone enough to sustain seven weeks at the top of the UK singles chart is pure insanity.

If “I’d Do Anything…” is about love then “Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back” is about hate. Meat Loaf rails against all the ways that he’s been screwed over and all the things that have let him down. We remember being told not to sing the part where he tells the audience where you can shove the future.

Something we did not know at the time but do now is that a lot of the songs on Bat II were released previously as part of Steinman’s early projects. In Meat Loaf he found the perfect voice to bring his visions to life, which was something of a double-edged sword for both men as their tempestuous relationship would show.

“Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through” is one of those songs. A slightly subtler love song, if such a thing is possible on a Meat Loaf album, it’s a promise that even in the darkest times, music can be a salvation. We don’t think it’s too on the nose to suggest that was probably most true for Meat Loaf. It leads into “It Just Won’t Quit”, originally released by Pandora’s Box, a song about the dangers of an obsession. This is one of our favourite songs from Bat II, feeling a little more stripped back than the others, relying mostly on the piano and Meat Loaf’s vocals.

“Out of the Frying Pan (And Into the Fire)” brings the bombast right back, with the guitars and drums returning to the fore. By ratcheting the tempo back up to eleven, this sounds much more like a traditional rock song albeit one with operatic flourishes.

And so we reach the anthemic “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are”, a song that is like nothing else on the album or in general. Part-tragedy, part-biography, “Objects…” tells the story of one man’s life and all the things that he has loved and lost: his best friend, his father, and his first love. It is as ambitious as “I’d Do Anything…” and just as memorable. What stands out on “Objects…” is the extent to which Meat Loaf’s vocals are doing all the heavy lifting. Anyone else would either be drowned by the scale of the music or left struggling to convey the emotional range required.

“Wasted Youth” is performed by Jim Steinman and sets up “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. We imagine a lot of people skipped over “Wasted Youth”, which is a shame because it provides a moment of pause and it is genuinely funny, the father’s plea to the son to look after his guitar at the end in particular. “Everything Louder…” is cut from the same cloth as “Out of the Frying Pan…”. Played fast and loud, it takes the problems of “Life Is a Lemon…” and says Who cares as long as there’s music?

The rock and roll continues, as Steinman raids his back catalogue again with “Good Girls Go to Heaven (Bad Girls Go Everywhere)”. It’s a song about rebellion, or at least the temptation of rebellion. This is the third version of the song to make it to the mainstream, following Megumi Shiina and Pandora’s Box, and Meat Loaf’s interpretation is a match for both.

“Back Into Hell” acts as a coda, reminding us of what has come before, and then the curtain is brought down with the shortest sung song on Bat II, “Lost Boys and Golden Girls”. It’s perhaps the album’s only miss for us, a saccharine ballad that feels out of place. Not a bad song by any stretch but it doesn’t offer anything that we can’t get anywhere else.

When we usually take an album from the Vault we have to listen to each song several times to capture all of our thoughts. Not so with Bat II: each song gives us ample time to compose this piece.

Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell has been a part of us since we can remember, and it has more than earned its place in the Vault. It is pure excess, pure extravagance, and it is Taped

*And we managed to write the whole essay without mentioning Wagner once.

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