In a 1978 interview with Gallery Magazine, Meat Loaf claimed that he “freaked out” one day and told Steinman he needed to decide whether Neverland was going to be a show or an album. Neverland fizzled out because Steinman and company had trouble getting the rights to the Peter Pan material in the show. Steinman and Meat Loaf later toured together in The National Lampoon Road Show, for which Steinman served as musical director. Meat Loaf found his way to New York City in the early ’70s and played the lead role in More Than You Deserve, a 1973 musical Steinman composed the music and co-wrote the lyrics for. Meat Loaf, a beefy Texas native who had grown up playing football before discovering his talent for musical theater. Steinman called the new musical Neverland, and he workshopped the production in 1977 at the Kennedy Center.īy this time, Steinman had met and formed a creative partnership with Michael Lee Aday, a.k.a. The musical never actually reached the stage, despite talk of David Bowie playing the lead, and somewhere along the way, Steinman completely reworked the show, incorporating plot elements from Peter Pan. The Dream Engine caught the attention of theater bigwig Joseph Papp, who hired Steinman to produce the show as part of the New York Shakespeare Festival. While attending Amherst College, he made up for his lackluster academic performance by writing The Dream Engine, a rock musical about “a conspiracy by the government, business and the military to control the nation’s youth by medicating them and suppressing their emotions,” according to The Washington Post, during his senior year in 1971. In high school, Steinman was a National Merit Scholarship finalist-though in Steinman’s version of events, he didn’t spend a lot of time studying. But he was actually from Long Island, New York, where he grew up in a well-to-do family with a father who owned a Brooklyn steel distribution warehouse. Broadway to ‘Bat Out of Hell’īy rights, Jim Steinman should have been born in some Transylvanian castle shrouded in fog and ringed by circling bats. He left behind a massive catalog of humongous-sounding songs, none more Steinman-esque than “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” an epic power ballad with three notable versions, two wild music videos, and one legendary backstory. Steinman, who died in 2021 at the age of 73, was obsessed with vampires (the inspiration for “Total Eclipse”), Peter Pan, adolescent lust, Phil Spector, motorcycles, leather, serial killers, and the intersection of Broadway and rock ‘n’ roll. “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” could only be the work of one man: Jim Steinman, the rock composer- songwriter isn’t nearly a strong enough word-best known for penning all of Meat Loaf’s biggest hits, as well as Bonnie Tyler’s immortal ’80s karaoke fave “ Total Eclipse of the Heart.” But maybe we should have, because in 1996, Dion released her mega-selling version of “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” a spectacularly overwrought love song that’s rooted in all of the above. Celine Dion is about as mainstream as it gets-nobody associates the Canadian queen of adult-contemporary ballads with Gothic literature, experimental theater, or motorcycle-based eroticism.
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