The main reason for this update is the update of the Bonnie Tyler and Patti Russo pages, but, as always, there’s more:

• Bat Out of Hell — The Musical has closed in London. But don’t worry, the German production in Oberhausen is an excellent version of the show, and definetly worth making the trip for. More details in my review of Bat Out of Hell — Das Musical.
• Speaking of Bat Das Musical, Willemijn Verkaik will be leaving the show at the end of March, after which walk-in cover Franziska Schuster will take over the role. So if you want to see Verkaik, you’d better hurry.
• Jim Steinman has been working on a Bat project for 40 years. Sometime in the mid-1990s, he wrote an ‘extended treatment’ to pitch a movie called Bat Out of Hell 2100.
• Rob Fowler and Sharon Sexton recorded a duets album, provinding their take on Falco and Sloane’s backstory: Vision of You. It’s available digitally from CD Baby, and physical CDs are available from Sharon’s facebook page.
• Back in 2017, a compilation of Bonnie Tyler Remixes and Rarities was released. I finally got a page up and running.
• Rumor has it that there will be a 2CD reissue of Stoney and Meatloaf, including previously unreleased material, sometime in March. I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of news.

The next update might take a while, but I plan to be working on restyling all scripts on this website. And then, I probably should start tacking the Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman pages.

The German production of Jim Steinman’s “Bat Out of Hell” — Das Musical mit den Welthits von Meat Loaf has opened in Oberhausen, Germany on November 8th, 2018. Because of the incredibly awesome work of Jonathan Rupprecht, I can now present the German lyrics to all the songs in the musical. Thank you, Jonathan!
An official video for a German language, edited version of “Bat Out of Hell” can be found on the promotional stuff about the musical page.
Tickets for “Bat Out of Hell” — Das Musical are available from musicals.de.

Since the last update, very confusing things happened to the North American Bat Out of Hell — The Musical tour. It started as planned in Toronto, but just before its final show there the rest of the tour first got cancelled, then postponed.
The official word is now that the musical will launch in 2019 ahead of a previously announced season at New York City Center. The production is working with everyone involved to reschedule the dates and news about the North American Tour will be announced soon.
To sign up for priority tickets for New York City Center in Summer 2019, visit the official Bat Out Of Hell — The Musical website.

The current London season is ending on January 5, 2019.

Bonnie Tyler will be touring Europe in 2019, and I am going to see her show in Utrecht. This will be her first concert in The Netherlands since she did the Night of the Proms in the early 2002, and her first solo show here in forever.
I’ll be traveling to Oberhausen to see the Bat — Das Musical in two weeks’ time, so you can expect a review in the weeks to come. Work on the updates for the Bonnie Tyler and Patti Russo pages is nearing completion. Then, I also need to figure out how to incorporate the review (I still need to write) of the Ellen Foley biography I read into the site. I hope that I can wrap this all up soonish.

Jim Steinman’s “Bat Out of Hell” — Das Musical mit den Welthits von Meat Loaf is set to open in Oberhausen, Germany on November 8th, 2018. The musical will be (almost) completely in German, and the German language promo has finally started.

Two videos have become available: a rehearsal take of “Wo tut mir der Schmerz am meisten weh” by Willemijn Verkaik and Alex Melcher, and a full-on promo video of “Jetzt kommt alles zurück zu mir” by Robin Reitsma, Sarah Kornfeld, Willemijn Verkaik and Alex Melcher. You can find them both, along with the lyrics, on the new “Bat Out of Hell” — Das Musical page. (With a massive thank you to Simone Lindtner, for the transcription of the lyrics.)

Tickets for “Bat Out of Hell” — Das Musical are available from musicals.de.

In related news, the North American Bat Out of Hell — The Musical tour has just kicked off in Toronto, and will run well into 2019. Finally, the current London season will end on January 5th, 2019.

Some weeks ago the news broke that Meat Loaf’s band would be touring with Americal Idol season 13 winner Caleb Johnson on vocal duties. To promote this tour, they have made a re-recording of the entire Bat Out of Hell album. BAT: Caleb Johnson and the Neverland Band performing the music of Meat Loaf is available for download on www.batexperience.com.

With today’s update, I have gone through the Stoney and Meatloaf and Karla DeVito pages. The former mostly got cosmetic changes, but I added some new things to Karla’s section as well:

• The Karla Jayne and the Boogie Man Orchestra “It’s My Party” single. This was Karla’s very first released recording.
• A transcription of the Interchords interview/promo LP.
• Information about the Rick Derringer live album she sang two songs on.
• Lyrics for the songs featuring Karla on the I’m Not Dead… Yet! album.
• I have also added a page for “Incognito”, a demo intended for a her second album, available on her website.

In other news, Jim Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell - Das Musical is scheduled to open in Oberhausen, Germany, this November. No information about the cast and what part of the show will be translated is available at the moment.

Next up on my to-do list is the Bonnie Tyler page, unless I decide to do some restyling first.

In this latest round of updates, I have overhauled the Ellen Foley section, and added a few Tanz der Vampire related recordings by Jan Ammann (including an “All-Male-Pop-Version” of “Totale Finsternis”) and Mark Seibert.

Next up are probably the Karla DeVito and Stoney and Meatloaf pages.

The survey about improving this website is now closed, and I’d like to thank all of you who have taken the time to fill it out.

The main take-away seems to be that you like the site like it is, with all discographies chronologically sorted, and all lyrics and information on one page. That won’t change much, then. As for the rest:

• To make the site more visually appealing, I have already started to add album covers to the overview pages: the new Tanz der Vampire page and the Pandora’s Box page are completed, and I’m pretty happy with that look.
• As adding more images met with general approval, I worked on two pages. Head over to the “Bat Out of Hell II” or “Welcome to the Neighborhood” pages to take a look. I’m quite pleased with the especially the latter one, as that now includes the original sources for the artwork used. (As I am trying to keep this website snappy, even with a bunch of images, I added a bit of JavaScript to lazy load them.)
• Navigation does not really seem to be a problem, so I’m keeping that as is, eventhough I might tweak it a bit.
• Script pages could use a bit of attention. It was suggested to make the formatting of the scripts constistent, regardless the source document, and I like that idea. I will also look into adding some additional navigation for scripts, as they’re quite long.
• I will try to add more relevant, additional information and do some more interlinking.
• Social sharing buttons are definatly not missed, and will not be added.

Finally, in a addition to the RSS feed (what’s RSS?) I have started an Twitter account, @MLJSlyrics, for updates and random snippets of lyrics. Or, for you to get in touch. There might be a Facebook page in the future as well.

While I will do a proper write up of the survey results later, but the main takeaways are that most respondents prefer to keep all album information and all lyrics on the same page, more images would be nice, and Tanz der Vampire should get its own page.

So, without further ado: all Tanz der Vampire pages have moved to their own section, to which I added a bunch of album covers, to give you an idea where I think this site is heading.

TL;DR: please help me improve this website by filling out a small survey.

The (almost) complete Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman lyric archive has been online in several incarnations since 2001, when I hosted my first very awful website on a free service with some ridiculous url. The site had it’s first proper version a year or two later at an equally lousy url courtesy of my ISP’s hosting services. It is in it’s current location since summer 2007, and undergone two major rewrites and several re-alignments.

As a professional front-end web developer, I try to make the internet better for you, the Esteemed End User™, one website at the time. For this site, that means that I have come at a cross-roads. It is pretty fast, should work just fine for just about everyone in any just about halfway decent browser. There is not much room left for improvement that I can see, except for search engine tweaking.

For a couple of searches, including “Jim Steinman lyrics”, this website is the number one Google result. After that, there is a sharp drop off, especially when you start searching for song lyrics. I believe this site would be better for The End User if they can find it more easily, but that would mean that I would have to put all lyrics on seperate pages. Which sort of goes against everything I always thought this site should do. (Namely, keep all relevant information regarding a release on the same page.)

Thinking this over, I got stuck and started to doubt some other features as well. So I turn it over to you. I made a survey with Google Forms, asking for some input on how you use the site, and how it could be improved. I’d be much obliged if you’d take the time to fill it out.

Please help me improve this website by filling out a small(ish) survey.

I will post about the results when there is anything to report. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

“Tanz der Vampire — Die 3 Grafen”, a new EP featuring Thomas Borchert, Mark Seibert, Drew Sarich — the three Krolocks of the 2017 Vienna Revival Cast of Tanz der Vampire — has been released. It features four songs: one solo for each Krolock, representing their favorite song from the show, and together they tackle “Die unstillbare Gier.”

In other news: I am thinking about how to improve this site, and will probably launch a survey asking your input soonish.

On October 13, 2017, the Original Cast Recording of Bat Out of Hell — The Musical was released in Canada. Tomorrow, October 20, will see the UK release.

But that is not all: at performances of the musical, copies of the Obsidian Times are given out. I have put up some digital representations of those. During a casting call a full script of the musical was “leaked”. Finally, going over the cast recording and script made me eliminate some typos that must have been there for ages.

Stoney and Meatloaf has been released on CD for the first time by Big Pink Music from Korea. There isn’t much information available about this label, but the CD looks and sounds great. I have updated the album page with the details and some scans.

Besides that, I tinkered with various Tanz der Vampire pages. The most notable changes are that there are now lyrics available for both Vámpírok Bálja (the Hungarian cast recording) and Бал вампиров (the Moscow cast recording). I have also added Ray Errol Fox’s synopsis of and liner notes for The Confidence Man.

Ellen Foley did a short European tour, and I saw both shows in The Netherlands. You can find my review on my blog.

A 2016 Moscow Cast Recording of Tanz der Vampire has been released: Бал вампиров.

The end of Bat Out of Hell — The Musical’s Manchester run is coming close. Next stop: the London Coliseum, and then starting October, Toronto. I saw the first two shows in Manchester, and did a write-up on my blog. I have also added a page with information from the program.

Tickets are still available for both Manchester and London, from BatOutOfHellMusical.com.

At long last, Jim Steinman's epic rock and roll theatrical fantasy BAT OUT OF HELL THE MUSICAL, the inspiration for one of the most iconic and successful albums in history, is set to explode onto the Manchester Opera House and London Coliseum stages in 2017.

The cast & creative team of Bat Out Of Hell – The Musical

Lead roles:
Andrew Polec as Strat
Christina Bennington as Raven
Rob Fowler as Falco
Sharon Sexton as Sloane

Also starring will be:
Aran MacRae as Tink
Danielle Steers as Zahara
Dom Hartley-Harris as Jagwire
Giovanni Spano as Ledoux
Patrick Sullivan as Blake

Ensemble cast:
Jemma Alexander, Emily Benjamin, Stuart Boother, Georgia Carling, Natalie Chua, Jonathan Cordin, Amy Di Bartolomeo, Jordan Lee Davies, Olly Dobson, Hannah Ducharme, Phoebe Hart, Rosalind James, Michael Naylor, Eve Norris, Tim Oxbrow, Andrew Patrick-Walker, Benjamin Purkiss, Anthony Selwyn, Courtney Stapleton and Ruben Van Keer

The creative team:
Book by Jim Steinman and Stuart Beattie
Music and lyrics by Jim Steinman
Direction by Jay Scheib
Choreography by Emma Portner
Musical arrangements and supervision by Michael Reed
Set design is by Jon Bausor
Costume design by Meentje Nielsen
Video design by Finn Ross
Lighting design by Patrick Woodroffe
Sound design by Gareth Owen
Orchestration by Steve Sidwell
Musical direction by Robert Emery

Tickets are available for both Manchester and London, from BatOutOfHellMusical.com.

Braver Than We Are, Meat Loaf’s 13th album, has officially been released in Europe. The U.S. and other territories will have to wait a while longer, until friday September 16th, 2016.

This seemed a good occasion to finally release a complete rebuild of this website. If you experience any issues, please get in touch.

Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly premiered Speaking in Tongues, the second single from Braver Than We Are.

Since the last update, we saw the release of two album tracks on Amazon, a host of preview-snippets on iTunes and the record label site (which requires Flash, so good luck with that on your mobile phones), so a bunch of lyrics are now up on the Braver Than We Are page.

But more exciting is the release of the first single, “Going All the Way Is Just the Start” featuring Ellen Foley and Karla DeVito.

Since we now have a release date (September 9, 2016 for everywhere but the US, who’ll have to wait a week), an album cover and a tracklist, I might as well put a Braver Than We Are page up.

This friday, October 17th, 2014, Le Bal des Vampires, the French version of Tanz der Vampire, will have its premiere in Paris. To celebrate, I’ve added a page for the only official soundbite we have.

Also, the RSS feed should be working again.

Ohai!

So, two and a half years since the last update. Once I got it into my pretty little head that I needed to redesign this website, I’ve been working on it on an on-and-off basis—mostly off, but still. A lot of pages needed a lot of work, and by now I think I got in an acceptable-enough shape. It’ll be a little rough around some edges, but this version should work better on tablets and smartphones.

Because of the way this site is set up, maintaining it requires a fair bit of work. That’s something I hope to fix in the next itteration, which I’m currently brewing on. I hope it won’t take as long as this one.

Remember those musicals that got dug up some months ago? Well, I finally got round to adding pages for the The Dream Engine and More Than You Deserve audition tapes.

Most of the songs on the The Dream Engine audition tape are known from the live recording. The only ‘new’ track is "You’ve Got to Love Me with the Sun in Your Eyes Until the Day That You Go Blind".

The More Than You Deserve tape contains more previously unheard material, including songs from Jim’s score for The Good Woman of Szechuan . "Song of the Golden Egg" and "Souvenirs" are pretty rad.

If you want to hear these tapes, see my previous post. Meanwhile, recordings of the two final performances of More Than You Deserve came to light. You can find links to those on The Rockman Record

Finally, I went to Seinäjoki, Finland to see Tanz der Vampire. I posted a review on my weblog. There’s a post on the the novel Whistle Down the Wind there as well.

On September 29th, Meat Loaf’s latest album Hell in a Handbasket has been released in Australia and New Zealand. (Which is quite a quick turnover, just 18 months behind Hang Cool Teddy Bear.)

Like a good boy, I pre-ordered a copy, and it arrived yesterday. Like a good web master, I got busy, and now all the Hell in a Handbasket lyrics are up.

I’ll review the album in due time.

Over the last few months I’ve acquired some missing singles and additional versions. Highlights include:

• Two Ellen Foley singles: Young Lust (which seems to be undocumented in the most comprehensive Ellen Foley discography on the web) and Johnny and Mary, which completes the trilogy of singles from the Another Breath album.
• An acetate for Pandora’s Box It’s All Coming Back To Me Now single, which includes an edit I hadn’t heard before and A Teenager in Love. In addition to another IACBTMN promo, a promo for "Safe Sex", a cassette promo for the Original Sin album and a spiffy poster which I’m trying to work into the Pandora’s Box page, I think I’m nearly done with that part of the collection. I don’t know if there’s much more out there to search for.
• Three promo singles were issued for Whistle Down the Wind, and I got two of ‘em. The third is a one-track promo for Tina Arena’s version of the title track, and I can live without that.
• Until recently, I didn’t know there were 12″ maxi-singles of "I’d Do Anything for Love" and "I’d Lie for You". I managed to track down copies of both, and the first has arrived.

Meat Loaf’s upcoming album Hell in a Handbasket will be released in Australia and New Zealand on September 29th. The first single, All of Me is out now. But only if you can access the Australian iTunes store. Which is still as stupid as a couple of months ago, when I posted this little rant on selling music on the internet.

Also, I’ve added pages for the Everything Louder Tour and Monsters of Rock 1983 programmes to the tour programmes section.

This is a quick update, not the one I promised last time. I’ve added a few tour programs, and updated the rest a bit. Eventually, when they’re all done, I’ll start up the scanner for some images. (By the way, if someone has got a spare copy of the Hang Cool Tour Program… I’m looking for one.)

Earlier this year, the very fine gentleman Ben Miller (nicknamed bellminer)—who is incidentally also behind the excellent Dream Pollution YouTube channel—liberated several demo and audition tapes from the archives of the New York Public Library. For this update, I tackled the demos.

• The Dream Machine contains outtakes from The Dream Engine, including two versions of a ‘new’ song, "Train of Love" and the Bette Midler demo of "Heaven Can Wait";
• Kid Champion from 1975, includes a lengthy instrumental with familiar bits, an completly different arrangement of "For Crying Out Loud" and the previously unheared song "Yogi";
• Phantom of the Paradise is a 1989 compilation of previously released material, demos and outtakes.

In case you wonder where you can get all this, check out these links while they still work: Dream Machine, Kid Champion, Phantom of the Paradise, More Than You Deserve and The Dream Engine auditions. Higher quality FLAC files are also available.

Up next: The Dream Engine and More Than You Deserve audition tapes.

Good grief. This is one long overdue update, and it isn’t quite complete either. This is just an update of the Meat Loaf section. Apart from restructuring the index page, I’ve added pages for the Collectors Edition of Welcome to the Neighbourhood and Team Backbone’s Stand in the Storm, Meat’s benefit single for Painted Turtle with John Rich, Lil Jon and Mark McGrath. There’s also a couple of new promos listed for "I’d Lie for You", "Not a Dry Eye in the House", "A Kiss is a Terrible Thing to Waste" and "Blind as a Bat."

In the next update, which I really should start working on again, there’ll be some really old school Jim Steinman musicals.

I’ve just finished another batch of tour programs.

More tour programs: I’ve added those of the ‘82 Euro tour, the 2001 Night of the Proms tour and the Three Bats Tour. I’ve also updated the other two. It remains funny how in one MatL&F is the best thing since sliced bread, and a couple years later it’s nothing more than a ‘joke’.

Another addition is a 1981 press release whose transcript was on my hard disc for ages. Coincidentally, it doubles at the opening essay in the ‘82 program. Spot the differences!

Since the last update Dans der Vampieren, the Belgian production of Tanz der Vampire has come and gone. Those of you who have missed it, you’ve missed an excellent show. Luckily, they’ve released a live highlights cast album of Dans der Vampieren, which you can order directly at the theater. For orders from outside Belgium or The Netherlands Sound of Music might be an easier option.

Further more, Meat Loaf has released a second (digital) single from Hang Cool Teddy Bear: If I Can’t Have You, a duet with Kara DioGuardia. It contains another non-album track called "Don’t get Me Goin’." Unfortunatly for all of us outside of the US, it’s still unavailable due to stupid and outdated geographical restrictions.

It won’t be long before the Vampires start to dance in Antwerp. Last wednesday’s issue of the Belgian magazine Knack (August 18th, 2010) contained a free promotional single of "Totale duisternis" and "Ontembare begeerte".

Rumor has it that a cast recording will be released about a month after the premiere.

It took a bit longer than expected, but I’ve finaly finished my review of Hang Cool Teddy Bear.

Late last month, a new cast recording of Tanz der Vampire was released, and it’s a blast. I’ve added a page for the Gesamtaufnahme Neue Wiener Fassung, which is German for ‘Complete Cast Recording of the new Vienna Production’.

Also, I was able to obtain a 1977 press kit for Bat Out of Hell. I don’t collect material like that per se, but as it included a print of my favorite photo of Meat and Jim together, I couldn’t resist.

Yesterday, Hang Cool Teddy Bear was released in The Netherlands. In due time, when I’ve had the chance to form an opinion on it, I’ll let you know what I think.

In a couple of weeks, a new, full recording of the current Vienna production of Tanz der Vampire will be released, starring Thomas Borchert, Marjan Shaki, Lukas Perman, Gernot Kranner, Anna Thorén and James Sbano. I’ve seen this version, and it was awesome. You can pre-order the album at Sound of Music.

Yesterday, "Los Angeloser" b/w "Boneyard" (a non-album ‘B-side’) was released as a digital single. So I added a page with the lyrics.

(Also, the temporary "Los Angeloser" page should now redirect to the single.)

After acquiring the 12″ maxi single of Bonnie Tyler’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain, that part of my collection is complete.

If you’re not living in North America, you can download "Prize Fight Lover"—an outtake from Meat Loaf’s upcoming Hang Cool Teddy Bear album—on hangcoolteddybear.com. (If you’re in North America, you’ll have to wait a bit, as mr. Loaf’s record company there has other plans with that track.) That site is also slowly revealing samples of the album, if you log in using facebook or Twitter. (I’m on Twitter too!)

Of course, you can find early transcriptions of those samples and the Prize Fight Lover lyrics on the Hang Cool Teddy Bear page.

Since the last update I’ve acquired two pretty rare singles:

• Totale Finsternis (Die Ewigkeit beginnt…), or, the "Love Duet" from Tanz der Vampire, and
• Patti Russo’s Dance Dance Dance single. Which is as far as I know still her only official solo release on a physical format.

Meat Loaf’s new album Hang Cool Teddy Bear is scheduled for release on April 19th, 2010. For now, the page just has the lyrics for the first single, "Los Angeloser."

Good news: Dans der Vampieren, the Belgian production of Tanz der Vampire is back on! Tickets for it’s (limited) September 2010 run in Antwerp can be ordered from Music Hall Productions.

On April 7th of 2009 I made some changes to this website, which meant that I could add some visitor tracking to all pages. Here are some of the relevant numbers for last year.

There were 8,505 visits from 5,872 absolute unique visitors who stayed for 1:58 on average. With 2.61 pages per visit, that’s good for 22,220 pageviews. Since April, there has been a strong upward trend: the number of visitors in December is almost twice as high.

Visitors stopped by from 90 countries. The top 5 is as follows:

1. Germany
2. United States
3. United Kingdom
4. The Netherlands
5. Poland

Unsurprisingly, search engines account for 69.04% of all visitors, and Google is king. At least 3,850 keywords end up at this website, ranging from snippets from lyrics to artists names, ect.

The three most popular albums are:

1. Tanz Der Vampire — Die Gesamtaufnahme
2. Taniec Wampirów
3. Patti Russo — MySpace

The browser stats is where it gets really interesting: Internet Explorer gets a beating from all other browsers!

1. Internet Explorer 46.62% (IE7: 51.37%, IE8: 36.34%, IE6: 12.23%, IE5.5: .05%)
2. Firefox 39.27%
3. Opera 5.01%
4. Safari 4.99%
5. Chrome 3.48%

If you promise to stop by again in 2010, I’ll promise that I’ll continue to update and tweak the site whenever I feel like it. ;-)

Since the last update there have been two new ’major’ releases.

1. Only for a While is a compilation of mostly unreleased Steve Barton songs. It’s released by Stage Door Records and quite lovely.
2. Bat Out of Hell: The Original Tour is a new DVD of Meat Loaf’s 1978 Rockpalast performance. Beware of the US version, which reportedly misses the two covers.

Other updates include several additional single versions, but you probably don’t need to track those down.

Finally, in other news, Meat Loaf is still working on his next album, Jim Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell: The Musical now has a website and an unofficial forum, and Dans der Vampieren is still off.

Last week, I received a 1991 promo-cd of The Garage Project featuring Patti Russo. You can find all the details I could find on the Let the Good Times Roll page. Also, I added the lyrics to "Don’t Ever Put Out the Flame" (a work in progress song she’s just added to her MySpace) to the other unreleased tracks page.

And while we’re on the topic of work in progress songs: Meat Loaf is in the studio recording his new album. One of the songs that might make it is Los Angeloser, witten by James Micheal (who wrote "Did I Say That?" and co-wrote "Blind as a Bat", "Couldn’t Have Said It Better", "Love You Out Loud" and "Man of Steel".) I’ve added a temporary page for the lyrics of his demo version.

And Dans der Vampieren is still off. Total bummer.

On a final note, I’m doing some Meat Loaf related blogging at the moment on my weblog. See the link on the sidebar.

Dans der Vampieren, the the Belgian production of Tanz der Vampire scheduled for a December 2009 run in Antwerp and a February 2010 run in Ghent, has (for now) been postponed until September 2010.

Musical van Vlaanderen vzw, the producer of the musical, blames the delay on Studio100 and Stimuhl, two competing musical production companies, who appealed a yearly € 2.5 million goverment grant. Studio100 and Stimuhl say that this postponement cannot be blamed on their appeal, as they claim that Dans der Vampieren wasn’t covered in the grant.

The Belgian Council of State has yet to rule on the appeal, and Tanz Belgium remains in limbo until then. It has been confirmed that tickets already bought will be refunded, and that groupreservations will be cancelled.

Related links:
⇒ Article on Broadway World

Lately, I seem to be on an online shopping spree. Lots of Dusty Springfield records, and some items related to this website. And in case you start to worry, don’t. I’m not starting a Dusty website anytime soon. Here’s the list of updates.

• Meat Loaf – Bat out of Hell 12″ US promo
• Meat Loaf – Two out of Three Ain’t Bad 7″ US promo
• Ellen Foley – Nightline 7″ single
• Children of the World – The Time is Now featuring Ellen
• Jim Steinman – Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through 12″ US promo
• Karla DeVito – Interchords sampler 12″ US promo

In other news, Meat Loaf is in the studio recording a new album, and provides, ahem, useful updates via Twitter. (If you like, you could also start following me, but I tweet mostly in Dutch and it’s very rarely Meat Loaf/Steinman related.) The album is scheduled for sometime next year, and one of the songs which is being recorded is Los Angeloser, written by James Michael who also (co-)wrote "Did I Say That", "Couldn’t Have Said it Better" and "Blind as a Bat".

Dans der Vampieren is the official title of the Belgian version of Tanz der Vampire. There are two limited runs in Antwerp (December 20, 2009—January 3, 2010) and Ghent (February 3–14). Ze zijn op komst seems to be the gateway to all official information.

As it’s a national holiday in The Netherlands, I have the time for an update. In a frenzy of internet shopping (and a not particually fruitful trip to the "most impressive record fair of the world") I acquired some stuff:

• Meat Loaf
  • Blind Before I Stop (UK 12″ including two live tracks that later reappeared on the "Special Girl" singles)
  • I’d Do Anything for Love (US promo including two heavily edited live versions and the unplugged version)
  • The Very Best of Interview CD (the answers to 17 questions)
  • The VH1 Storytellers Sampler (three songs and their stories)
• The Sisters of Mercy
  • This Corrosion (12″ of this song produced by Jim)
  • Vision Thing (LP, includes "More", which is written and produced by Andrew Eldritch and Jim Steinman)
• Ellen Foley — Another Breath LP
• Bonnie Tyler — Making Love (including two slightly different edits)

On the Meat Loaf page, I also added the Chat out of Hell interview CD I have had lying around for years, and a section for the books. If anyone has a copy of Phönix aus der Hölle by Patrizia Kurz und Ralf E. Isenbarth (ISBN-10: 3927801844, ISBN-13: 978-3927801844) for me to complete that part of the collection, please get in touch. (Hey, I had to get in that link to the revamped colophon somewhere …)

As I said before, there’s not a lot left for me to collect. If you don’t count a ‘live’ version of "Blind as a Bat" that can only be found on a single that was never commercially released (and of which only one copy is known to exist), I have a hard copy of every song Meat Loaf has ever released. Dito for mr. Steinman and Pandora’s Box, and my Bonnie Tyler collection is as complete as I need it to be. So what’s left? Mostly odds and ends by Karla DeVito and Ellen Foley (most of her singles–like The Shuttered Palace–contain album tracks as b-sides, with Boys in the Attic being an exception as it contains a non-album track), and additional but superfluous single versions like the special half-speed mastered edition of Jim’s Lost Boys and Golden Girls single. Exciting, huh?.

So the most exciting bit is probably the page for the three new tracks by Ellen, that are available from her MySpace, iTunes and the like. You can also read my thoughts about download stores on my weblog.

The mailman was kind enough to deliver a package containing 4 maxi-singles this morning, so that gives me enough content for an update. Apart from a Paradise by the Dashboard Light 12″ from 1978, they’re all from 1983:

• Barry Manilow – Read ‘Em and Weep.
• Nightline by Ellen Foley. Three dance mixes. Apart from the DUB version available on the 2007 reissue of "Another Breath."
• Paul Anka – Gimme the Word. Duet with Karla DeVito. A remix.

Later, I’ll add a page for the "Album Sampler–Autumn ‘95", which contains three tracks from "Welcome to the Neighborhood".

update: It’s up. Also, for those who haven’t seen it yet, some handiwork.

Earlier today a single dropped in the mailbox, which reminded me of some overdue updates:

• Live at the "Bottom Line" in N.Y.C. is a promotional LP of a 1977 Meat Loaf concert
• "L.A. Radio" is a 1979 promotional only LP, which contains Jim Steinman’s Shadows on the Freeway, an early version of "Nocturnal Pleasures."
• While both Bonnie Tyler’s Hide Your Heart album (a.k.a. Notes from America) and You’re the One single were made without Jim’s input, I picked ‘em up anyway.

Until the next update.

This is a summing up of all news items posted between this sites birth in 2004 and 2009. Links might be broken.