Inspiration
The song was inspired by teenage tragedy songs such as "Leader of the Pack" and "Tell Laura I Love Her", the latter being the first single Jim Steinman had ever bought. Steinman wanted to write the "most extreme crash song of all time":
There is something so thrilling to me about that operatic narrative that involves a cataclysmic event, especially one so perfectly intune with a teenager's world, and rock and roll, as a car or motorcycle crash.
On a musical and thematic level, "Bat Out of Hell", both single and album, are often compared to the work of Bruce Springsteen, particularly the Born to Run album, and especially the song "Thunder Road". Steinman says that he finds that "puzzling, musically," although they share influences. "Springsteen was more an inspiration than an influence." A BBC article suggested, "...the fact that Max Weinberg and Roy Bittan from Springsteen's E Street Band played on the album only helped reinforce the comparison."
According to Meat Loaf, the song is "constructed from" a shot near the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in which the viewer looks down a valley and sees the lights of a city. He says all the clients in the Bates Motel "wish they would have left like a bat out of hell... It had nothing to do, believe it or not, with Bruce Springsteen. It had to do with Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho."
Read more about this topic: Bat Out Of Hell (song)
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enter into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter.”
—Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)
“The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)