Remembering Jim Steinman
• UPDATED: Jim Steinman, the composer, lyricist and record producer, probably best known as Meat Loaf‘s longtime musical collaborator, died on Monday, April 19, in Danbury, CT, state medical examiner confirmed to Variety. He was 73. His brother, Bill Steinman, told the Associated Press that the cause of death was kidney failure after strokes.
Steinman famously composed Meat Loaf’s massively successful 1977 debut album, the operatic Bat Out of Hell, which became one of the best-selling albums of all time with more than 50 million copies sold around the world. Steinman also worked on Meat Loaf’s 1981 album Dead Ringer, served as composer/producer on his 1993 album Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell and composed his 2016 album, Braver Than We Are.
Steinman also composed Bonnie Tyler‘s hit, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Barry Manilow‘s “Read ‘Em and Weep,” Air Supply‘s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” and Celine Dion‘s version of “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.”
In 1996, Steinman wrote the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s musical Whistle Down the Wind, which premiered at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. and opened in London’s West End in 1998. It has been revived several times and toured around the world. Bat Out of Hell also got the musical treatment in 2017 — Steinman wrote all of the songs, most of which were featured on the Bat Out of Hell album trilogy. He also worked on the soundtracks for Shrek 2, the musical Tanz der Vampire, the comedy Rude Awakening, the musical More Than You Deserve and others. Steinman was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012.
