The Soundtrack to My Life, Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell By Meatloaf

That might sound a bit odd coming from a Christian, but it’s true there is no other album I love listening to more than Back into Hell.  It brings back memories of my childhood and I must have listened to it more than a 100 times to date.  I know the words to the songs and they speak to me in my life.  I would like to share some of the lyrics and what they mean to me.

“I’d do anything for love (but I won’t do that)” is the first track on the album and for me it speaks about a person who is desperate to find love but can’t move on.  There lyric that speaks especially to me is “maybe I’m lonely and that’s all I’m qualified to be”, because I am lonely but seen as I have never had a girlfriend that is all I am qualified to be.

“Life is a lemon and I want my money back” I love to play this song when I am angry with the world. This song is all about injustice and a true lament about life.  What I love is the imagery where the backing singers go through a list of the good things in life and one by one Meatloaf shoots them down with appropriate phrases to do with modern living for instance “What about love? It’s defective; it’s always breaking in half”.

“Rock and Roll Dreams come through” if anyone can tell me what a Rock and Roll dream is I would be grateful.  As much as I love this song it sometimes sends me to sleep with its melodic beat.  My favourite line is “You’re never alone cause you can put on the phones and let the drummer tell your heart what to do” because it speaks of hope for people who are lonely.

“It just won’t quit” is a song which I adore because it describes how I feel most of the time.  Not quite knowing why you feel a certain way but unable to get rid of the feeling anyway.  The opening lines describe it perfectly as you seem to come in half way through a conversation.  “And I never really sleep anymore and I always get those dangerous dreams and I never get a minute of peace and I gotta wonder what it means”.

“Out of the frying pan (And into the fire)” is a well known metaphor for going from a hard situation to a worse one.  In the song I like to think it means that he wants to the person on an adventure.  My favourite line from the song is “I’ve never been this hot and I’ve never been so bored and breathing is just no fun anymore, and then I saw you like a summer dream and you’re the answer to every prayer that I ever said” because I know how feels to have that woman who sets your world on fire when you just see them.

While there are many other fine songs on the album it would take forever to write about each one and most would be pretty much the same reasons why I like them. So last two tracks I would like to mention are “Wasted Youth” and “Everything Louder than Everything Else” because they are my favourite tracks off the album.  For a long time I thought that they were actually the same song, but realised after a while that “Wasted Youth” was the spoken monologue by Jim Steinman, which is bursting with raw energy.  It goes straight into “Everything Louder than Everything Else” which has a fantastic middle section which ends with a marching beat and the lines “A wasted youth is better by far than a wise and productive old age” If there ever was an anthem for my life this would be it, for me it says enjoy yourself and don’t worry about the future, which is what I try to do.