Max's Musings

Soundtrack, Feb 28, Total Eclipse of the Heart.

"Total Eclipse of the Heart" was the lead single by Bonnie Tyler from her 1983 album, Faster Than the Speed of Night . The song was written by Jim Steinman, who also produced the album--more on him in a bit. The single was Tyler's biggest career hit, toping the Billboard charts in the both US and the UK. In fact, it kept another Steinman-written song, Air Supply's "Out of Nothing at All," from reaching the top spot in the US.

The song is likely also Stenman's biggest and best-known hit, but he wrote many other awesome songs--arias, really--about obsessive love, including Meatloaf's "I'd Do Anything For Love (Except that)" and Air Supply's "Oot of Nothing At All," among others. When he wrote "Total Eclipse of the Heart," he'd also been working a score for a musical version of Nosferatu, and he originally intended it to be a vampire song. The song was subsenquently included in his musical, Dance of the Vampires, and he's said, "If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in the dark..."1

The theme for this paricular set of blogs is supposed to be about the songs that have inspired my fiction. That's true for this song, too, except I'm still *writing* the story in question, so I can't link to it. It will be final story, "Liam's Tale," in the collection

As always, if you want to read any of these tales, drop me a note and I'll send the passkey.

The tale from the source material--It's obvious what that is, right?--is short, more or less parodies the other tales, and gets cut off for being "boring." Using this song, along with "Out of Nothing At All," I've figured out more or less how to do that. But, it'll take a couple of more days for the germ of the idea to percolate into a real story. I'll probably come back here once I'm done so people can find it.

Anway, here's the awesome video that went with Steinman's masterwork.

Footnotes
1  Hernandez, Ernio (18 September 2002). "Rando, Steinman Talk About Dance of the Vampires at Press Preview, Sept. 18". Playbill.