I've often enjoyed Bonnie Tyler. Considering Jim Steinman saw enough in her to produce her Faster Then the Speed of Night album, I'm not the only one. From the time I heard that album, all I could think of was how well she and Meat Loaf would complement one another in a duet.

That duet came, rather surprisingly, with the Meat Loaf song "A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste." In regards to how much she sang, Bonnie doesn't have the same equal footing in this duet as Cher did with Meat Loaf when they did "Dead Ringer for Love" on Dead Ringer, but it's very good.

The closest thing Bonnie and Meat get aside from this is her remakes of two Steinman tunes. First, she redid Meat's "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad." She did it as a fast-paced dance number; while it's fun and good, the same classic feel of Meat's version is just not there in any form.

Second, she redid "Making Love Out of Nothing at All." This Air Supply original has always been an 80s pop favorite of mine, and when I heard Bonnie had redone it, I was skeptical—it's tough to take someone's signature song and try to do it. She didn't do so well with "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," but with "Making Love," she did. Definitely listen to that one to see how Steinman's tune fares elsewhere.

On the compilation album Meat Loaf and Friends, Bonnie is featured singing three Steinman tunes:

• "Faster Than the Speed of Night" is a fast and furious piece, full of kick-ass piano playing.
• "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is vintage Steinman, loaded with imagery and metaphors and tons of emotion and overpowering backgrounds. Rory Dodd, who has sung backups on lots of Meat, is the famous voice behind the "Turn around, bright eyes" line.
• "Holding Out for a Hero" was originally heard in the Movie Footloose (with Kevin Bacon) and later as the them song for a now-obscure TV show in the 1984 called Cover Up.
  • Interesting trivia: The show Cover Up was quite good, but co-star John-Erik Hexum died during filming one day when he accidentally shot himself in the head with a gun loaded with blanks. Hexum had a slowly blossoming career—that started with a great time travel show called Voyagers!—cut short by that tragedy.