'Why' Is The Hardest Question. I think I Can Finally Answer It.

My colleague D.M. asked me, I believe when I was eulogizing Jim Steinman, what it is about his music that spoke to me in a way no one else's ever has. My answer was likely incomplete, as I struggle to understand my own emotions, let alone put them into words. Perhaps the reason I spent so much time wrapped up in the idea I had no emotions at all was simply to avoid having to explain them to people when I lacked the means to do so. I wouldn't put it past me.

I wrote recently about having officially declared Meat Loaf and Jim Steiman is/are once again my favorite artist/s, usurping my decades long list-topper, which has given me pause to stop and re-evaluate the relationship I have with that music. To be precise, I was now asking myself the question D.M asked me back then; why Jim Steinman above everyone else who has ever written songs?

I believe I can answer that question better today than I could in the past. That stems from a better understanding of myself, which is another topic I have written about to a degree in recent months. Music and personality are not independent factors that move freely through space and time, they are energies headed in the same direction. They might fluctuate, moving closer and further in imperfect paths, but I am drawn to music that fits my personality just as much as the music I like influences the person I am.

I discovered Steinman's music when I was ten years old, which amuses me, because it was entirely the wrong point in life for his music to have drawn me in. Steinman was perpetually stuck in the tidal pool of teenage hormones, while I had not yet felt them. Would I ever? That's hard to say. The point I'm making is that what makes great music great is the ability for it to speak to us from multiple perspectives, and to grow and evolve with us as we change as people.

As a kid listening to "Bat Out Of Hell II", Steinman's childishness was what caught my ear. I wore a hole in my tape when Meat Loaf sang the line about how you could take the future and "shove it up your ass". Even though I was a Laurel & Hardy person, his reference to The Three Stooges was an amusing middle-finger, although I didn't know to whom.

That young version of myself heard the obvious jokes and got a chuckle. That was why he was interested.

As time wore on, and I felt my soul rusting in its cage, I began to see more that lived beneath the surface of the songs. That line about the future was not just an off-color joke, it was a recognition that the future is a concept we create to give the world meaning. The reference to the Stooges was an acknowledgement that life is an absurdity, as we need to be able to pop the balloon of self-importance.

When Steinman ended "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" with the epic statement, "I'm waiting for the end of time so I can end my time with you," it wasn't merely a pun, it was a painful understanding that being people who live up their promises no matter the consequences puts us in positions where happiness is always on the wrong side of the horizon. Being a good person and being a happy person may not be compatible.

Or when Steinman wrote in "Left In The Dark" that "there are no lies on your body, so take off your dress, I just want to get at the truth," he was navigating the complexities of relationships by understanding that sometimes the lust that gets you through the night is more essential to our sanity than the love that gets us through life.

The older version of myself waxed philosophically. That was why he was interested.

Today, I find myself in very much the same place Steinman spent his life. I feel trapped in a mind and body that doesn't allow me to experience the things I want most. Perhaps it is an "arrested development and just another wasted youth" as Steinman wrote, but I see it as something more insidious than that. Whether you are a philosopher or just someone who gives advice to friends, we have agreed there are certain drives and experiences that make us who we are, that give life meaning, that define the human experience.

Some of us are wired in ways that make those nearly impossible, and the torrent of love songs and Hallmark movies that show us how things are 'supposed' to be only boils the disappointment into a thicker depression. There isn't a place in pop culture for people like me to be anything but the butt of the joke, or the triumph of pity when the lode has finally been mined. (I think Steinman would appreciate how bad that line is.)

Jim Steinman's songs are about love and lust, but they have always been written from the perspective of someone who is never able to get what he wants. Even when he thinks he does, it turns out to be a tragic twist of fate. These songs are a way of working through the existential pain of feeling cursed by whatever force you think guides the universe, even if that is merely the terrible luck of getting corrupted genes.

I struggled for much of my forty-first year not to hate myself for various reasons. I failed at times, and when I did, Steinman's songs were always there for me. They reminded me I am not the only person to feel as if I was not built for this world, I am not the only one whose dreams are encoded in a language only I can understand.

Jim Steinman's music is a lesson that even when it feels as if hope is a four-letter word (one of my favorite jokes), pain can be turned into beautiful art.

The current version of myself needs to believe that. That is why I remain interested.