The biggest power ballad of the 1980s was written for a vampire musical that was never made, and its original title was “Vampires in Love.”
Here is what Jim Steinman said about it, who sings the other half, and why nobody noticed for twenty years.
The Short Answer
A vampire love song. Steinman said so directly: he had been working on a musical version of Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu, wrote this as its love duet, and later described it as a tribute to that film. His summary of the lyric is that it is all about darkness, the power of darkness and love’s place in the dark.
The Story Behind the Song
Bonnie Tyler had signed to Sony and wanted to move from country rock into rock. She had seen Meat Loaf perform “Bat Out of Hell” on The Old Grey Whistle Test and asked Muff Winwood at the label to approach Jim Steinman, who wrote and produced for Meat Loaf.
By Tyler’s account, Winwood thought she was mad and told her Steinman would never do it. She asked him to try anyway. Steinman initially declined, then changed his mind after hearing her demos, saying she had the right voice for what he was attempting and later describing her performance on the track as an exorcism.
At their meeting in his apartment overlooking Central Park, he played the piano while the singer Rory Dodd sang. Tyler has said Steinman told her he had started writing the song years earlier for a prospective Nosferatu musical and had never finished it.
It became the lead single from her fifth album, Faster Than the Speed of Night, released in Britain in February 1983 and in America that May.
Which lines are the vampire lines?
Steinman’s own position was that if you listen to the words, they read as vampire lines throughout. Once you know, the song is difficult to hear any other way.
The narrator is terrified, exhausted from lying awake, calling for someone who only comes at night, describing a hunger she cannot satisfy and a forever that begins tonight. The repeated instruction to turn around is a command from something behind her.
Immortality explains the scale of it. A love song that keeps escalating past any human proportion makes sense when the promise being made is literally endless.
Who is the man singing?
Rory Dodd, who is not credited. Steinman wrote it as a duet for Tyler and Dodd, and by Dodd’s account liked the role reversal of a female voice handling the rough part and a male voice supplying the pure high tenor.
Dodd has described the session: Steinman kept vampire hours and preferred working at night, and Dodd had been singing for ten hours when he was asked to record his part at two in the morning. He has said the missing credit hurt, while also saying he would give anything to get another call from Steinman about a new song.
Was it written for Meat Loaf?
There are competing accounts. Reporting has said Steinman first offered this and “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” to Meat Loaf for his 1983 album, and Tyler has said Steinman had started it for Meat Loaf but finished it for her.
Meat Loaf’s own view was consistent. Tyler has recalled him saying, after it became a hit, that the song should have been his.
The version of Steinman’s history that both stories fit is that he carried the song around for years, from an unfinished musical to a possible Meat Loaf record to a Welsh singer who asked for him by name.
How big was it?
It reached number one in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, and made Tyler the first Welsh singer to top the Billboard Hot 100.
While it sat at number one in America, the record directly beneath it was Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All,” also written by Steinman, which never reached the top. One writer summed the situation up as a total eclipse of the charts.
The video was shot at a former asylum in Surrey. Tyler has said the guard dogs would not go into the downstairs rooms where electric shock treatment had been administered.
Did the vampire musical ever happen?
Not that one. The Nosferatu project was abandoned, but Steinman returned to the subject in 1997 with Dance of the Vampires, a musical based on the Roman Polanski film, which opened in Vienna and contains an alternate version of this song.
A love duet written for one vampire show, released as a pop single, then finally staged in a different vampire show fourteen years later, is a career arc that only Steinman had.
Why it lasted
Because it commits to an emotional scale nobody else would attempt. Seven minutes on the album, no restraint anywhere, and a singer with a damaged voice delivering it as though her life depends on it.
Steinman died in 2021. The song is played every time there is a solar eclipse, by people who have no idea it was written about something that drinks blood.
Power ballads get separated from their writers faster than almost any other kind of record; when the title escapes you, our song lyrics search is where to start.