Jim Steinman Dead At 73: The Bombastic Songwriter Behind “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Meat Loaf’s ‘Bat Out Of Hell’

Jim Steinman, whose career as a composer, lyricist, record producer and musician reached back to the late 1960s, has died, Deadline confirmed. He was 73.

Steinman’s best known work was his 1977 collaboration with singer Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell. The album has gone 14x Platinum on the strength of singles like “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad,” and the tapestry of outsized melody, straight ahead rock, and lyrical bombast that those songs wove became Steinman’s stock-in-trade.

In 1984, the songs from the Footloose soundtrack were a hit on radio and at MTV, which had just debuted in 1981, and the Steinman composition “Holding Out For a Hero” combined his trademark pomposity and grandiose flourishes with Bonnie Tyler’s strident vocal to gallop its way to no. 34 on the Billboard Hot 100. Since a track that triumphant will live forever, there’s a chance you also know the song from its appearance in The Angry Birds Movie 2 from 2019.

“Hero” wasn’t Steinman’s first collaboration with Tyler, though. In 1983, Steinman wrote and produced the Welsh singer’s worldwide smash “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a song that might be the 80’s power ballad to end all power ballads, and with a lengthy soundtrack use history of its own. It also featured a melody Steinman had previously explored in his score for the 1980 film A Small Circle of Friends.

Steinman contributed work to other film soundtracks, including Shrek 2 and the 1989 Cheech Marin/Eric Roberts buddy comedy Rude Awakening. He also composed the score for a 2017 musical version of Bat Out of Hell, and wrote the lyrics for the 1996 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Whistle Down the Wind.

What could be Steinman’s bid for a true cult following is his work for the 1984 Walter Hill film Streets of Fire, a stylized, almost surreal “rock & roll fable” featuring a nineteen-year-old Diane Lane alongside Michael Pare. The Steinman composition “Nowhere Fast” ran his elemental use of pounding piano, histrionic vocal runs, and desperate balladry through an early ‘80s teenage kaleidoscope, and remains an enduring classic of the era.