Like a Bat Out of Hell...

Sirens are screaming
and the fires are howling
way down in the valley tonight.

There's a man in the shadows
with a gleam in his eyes
and a blade shining oh-so bright.

There's evil in the air
and there's thunder in the sky
and a killer's on the bloodshod streets.

Oh and down in the tunnel
where the deadly arise
you know, I swear I saw a young boy
down in the gutter, he was starting to foam
in the heat...

It's a love song, really.
Happy Halloween 2014,
and make it a great weekend!

And I think, "Somebody, somewhere
must be tolling a bell......................."

And the last thing I see
is my heart, still beating...
breaking out of my body
and flying away...
like a bat out of hell.

ADDED: Nevermind ~Meatloaf. Nothing says Halloween like a honking pot of chili.

AND MORE:

Steinman and Meat Loaf had immense difficulty finding a record company willing to sign them. According to Meat Loaf's autobiography, the band spent most of 1975 writing and recording material, and two and a half years auditioning the record and being rejected.

Manager David Sonenberg jokes that they were creating record companies just so they could be rejected.  They performed the album live in 1976, with Steinman on piano, Meat Loaf singing, and sometimes Ellen Foley joining them for "Paradise". Steinman says that it was a "medley of the most brutal rejections you could imagine."

Meat Loaf "almost cracked" when CBS executive Clive Davis rejected the project. The singer recounts the incident in his autobiography. Not only did Davis, according to Meat Loaf, say that "actors don't make records", the executive challenged Steinman's writing abilities and knowledge of rock music:

Do you know how to write a song? Do you know anything about writing? If you're going to write for records, it goes like this: A, B, C, B, C, C. I don't know what you're doing. You're doing A, D, F, G, B, D, C. You don't know how to write a song... Have you ever listened to pop music? Have you ever heard any rock-and-roll music... You should go downstairs when you leave here... and buy some rock-and-roll records.

Meat Loaf asserts "Jim, at the time, knew every record ever made. [He] is a walking rock encyclopedia." Although Steinman laughed off the insults, the singer screamed "Fuck you, Clive!" from the street up to his building.

Todd Rundgren, however, found the album hilarious, thinking that it was a parody of Springsteen. The singer quotes him as saying: "I've got to do this album. It's just so out there."

They told the producer that they had previously been signed to RCA.  In one 1989 interview with Classic Rock magazine, Steinman labeled him "the only genuine genius I've ever worked with. In a 1989 interview with Redbeard for the In the Studio with Redbeard episode on the making of the album, Meat Loaf revealed that Jimmy Iovine and Andy Johns were potential candidates for producing Bat Out of Hell before being rejected by Meat and Steinman in favor of Rundgren, who Meat initially found cocky but grew to like...