This morning, as I got in the car to drive to work, the radio told me Meatloaf had died.

Meatloaf, particularly when in combination with Jim Steinman’s lyrics, has long been part of my life. My older sister bought Bat out of Hell the first time round, while she still lived at home. My mother, of all the musical choices she could have made, used to set up the ironing board and iron to it. A few years later I would borrow the album and play it and Dead-Ringer while I hammered at the keyboard of my dads old typewriter attempting to turn keystrokes into stories. One of the first albums I remember buying was Bad Attitude, Meatloaf’s first post Steinman album, which was something of a flop in trhe charts but I still kind of like…

Meatloaf was never cool, Bat out of Hell came out in 77, in the middle of punk, year was operatic pompous over the top Rock and Roll… He never became cool, which I think its a blessing. Cool never lasts, cool is fleeting, Queen were never cool, nor were the Stones come to that. Meatloaf’s music was just powerful, awesome, and inspiring. It didn’t care what you thought of it, it would belt out at you anyway, and because of that it was something special…

Those songs, and that music will mean different things to different people, but I suspect they mean something to everyone. I suspect they touch us all one way or another over the years. To me back in 77 when I was 7 years old growing up in a northern city, those song were all of a different world, a world of endless highways, burning sand on midnight beaches, screaming engines, cheery red lipstick and everything America impossibly was in my 7 year old imagination…

So, while I have not listened the full album of Bat out of Hell in years, due to the way we consume music in this digital age. I think tonight I shall put the album on the turntable, after I have blown the dust off it. And maybe offer my throat to the wolf with the red roses, as heaven it seems could not wait any more…