Rock legends don’t get much bigger than Meat Loaf, AKA Marvin Lee Aday.
The man has an estimated 50 million album sales under his belt, has acted in acclaimed cult flicks like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Fight Club, and ranks as one of the most colourful figures contemporary pop currently has.
He’s not showing any signs of slowing down either: he’s just dropped his thirteenth record, Braver Than We Are,one written with his longtime creative collaborator Jim Steinman. Though Steinman was initially only going to contribute two or three songs, before long he became an integral player in the process, and a lot of material was plucked from older projects and rewritten.
‘More’, for example, was originally recorded by The Sisters Of Mercy in 1990, and ‘Loving You’s A Dirty Job (But Somebody’s Gotta Do It)’ first appeared on Bonnie Tyler’s 1986 album Secret Dreams And Forbidden Fire, while other tracks date back to early Steinman musicals The Dream Engine and Neverland.
More than that, Steinman was in daily contact with Aday and his producer/guitarist Paul Crook, acting as creative consultant and reworking the songs while remotely assisting in all aspects of the project. The end result is as suitably epic and over-the-top as all of Aday and Steinman’s best work together: an album that the singer declares, “is a tribute to both of us and our work together”.
Aday, agrees with Steinman’s sentiments that the record is one of the best things that he has ever worked on in his entire life. “I’ve never seen Jim so much in love with a record since we’ve been working together,” Aday says. “I have listened to this record more than all of the other records I’ve ever made combined. This record, if you really sit to listen to it, will take you on a journey. It will hypnotise you. It honestly does. It’s hypnotic, and I’ve never done a record like that!”
Of course, Steinman and Aday have been friends and occasional collaborators for some time now – since “somewhere early in ’72” Aday reckons – and the pair have never let business disputes affect their friendship, no matter what the press’ version of that story insists.
“That’s an assumption of the media actually,” Aday says. “Because what happens is lawsuits happen: but I don’t file a lawsuit against Jim, and he doesn’t file against me. Some manager will file a lawsuit against that other manager, or the record company will file against something, and then they turn to me and Jim and go, ‘Okay, you two can’t talk to each other.’ [But] Jim and I have always talked to each other.”
Despite the insane success of their past work together, Aday is adamant that they don’t work to fulfil specific expectations, whether those restrictions be external or self-imposed. “I’ve never lived my life like that,” he says. “What happened yesterday, happened yesterday. Not all of it is good, [but] some of it is good, some of it is bad, some of it is incredibly great – and so you learn from your mistakes.
“You learn from your failures, and you learn from your successes, but you can never live off of either one,” he continues. “People are going to judge this record against Bat Out Of Hell. But Jimmy thinks this record is much better than that one.”
The album pivots on the colossal ‘Going All The Way Is Just The Start (A Song In 6 Movements)’, an 11-minute epic that Aday ranks up with some of his best work. “I’m going to be honest with you,” he says. “If people really go and listen to the first verse of ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ and the first verse of ‘Going All The Way’, it’s the same voice, just a different timbre. It’s exactly the same voice, but I think the first verse of ‘Going All The Way’ is the best thing dramatically that I have ever put on record.”
The track also features both Ellen Foley, a musician famous for performing on the studio version of ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’ and Karla DeVito, best known for appearing in the video clip for ‘Paradise’ and singing it live on tour with Aday. It was a meeting of worlds that wasn’t without its initial hiccups, but one that proved fruitful indeed.
“Ellen was a little apprehensive about doing it at first,” Aday says. “They hadn’t had the greatest relationship, Karla and Ellen, because Ellen felt she didn’t get the recognition because Karla did the video with [Ellen’s] voice. But the next day we had two different cars booked [for Foley and DeVito], and they said, ‘Never mind, we’ll come together,’ and they had dinner that night. They checked in together, and they have remained in contact ever since then. That was one of the greatest things Jimmy and I have ever done.”
Braver Than We Are features a suitably epic cover painting, one depicting Aday and Steinman facing down what appears to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “Exactly! Very good!” Aday erupts with glee. But it’s not just an idle image: the musician argues that it’s representative of a general attitude that has served him well throughout his entire career. “The cover is a defiance against the record industry,” Aday says. “They’re the Four Horseman of the Record Industry.”
Braver Than We Are, Meat Loaf’s new album, is available now through Caroline.
