Jim Steinman

Best known in conjunction with his enormously successful collaborations with singer Meat Loaf, producer and composer Jim Steinman rose to the top of the pop charts on the strength of his distinctively operatic artistic vision. A native of New York City trained as a classical pianist, he first surfaced during the mid-1970s with the off-Broadway musical More Than You Deserve; among its cast was Houston-born Marvin Lee Aday, a.k.a. Meat Loaf. The two men reunited a few years later for a tour with the National Lampoon Road Show, after which Steinman began composing a musical update of the Peter Pan story titled Never Land. Many of the songs he wrote for the project were then instead incorporated into Meat Loaf's 1978 LP Bat Out Of Hell, a teen rock opera which spawned three Top 40 singles -- "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," and "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth" -- on its way to becoming one of the best-selling albums of the decade.

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