The music world woke up this morning to learn that rock icon Meat Loaf, best known for his 1977 album Bat Out Of Hell, had died at 74 years old. In the final months of his life, Meat Loaf (whose real name is Michael Lee Aday) seemed excited about the future: In one of his final interviews, conducted before an October 2021 appearance at the Motor City Comic Con in Detroit, he told Billboard he had a bunch of new projects and endeavors in the works.
One of those plans was a four-track EP that would feature a “rock ‘n’ roll version” of “What Part Of My Body Hurts The Most?,” from Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical. He hoped to have Shaun “Stoney” Murphy, with whom he recorded the collaborative 1971 album Stoney & Meatloaf, join him for the project.
He noted of Murphy, “I was doing Hair at the Vest Pocket Theater and got a message Motown wanted to meet me. I said, ‘Why don’t we do a duet record,’ and they said, ‘That’s exactly what we were thinking.’ I said, ‘With Stoney,’ and they said, ‘That’s exactly what we were thinking.’ So I went with Stoney and said, ‘They want to do a record with us,’ and she said ‘OK’ and we did it. It was very cool, all those great people we worked with.”
Furthermore, he was also considering going on a world tour, saying:
“My voice is in incredible shape. […] I can sing ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ no problem — all the same key, all the high notes. […] I’m figuring out how to do shows without moving, with [props] being brought out and doing weird stuff, creative stuff… I keep calling my agent. I left him a message, ‘Let’s do five weeks, 16 shows in America, take a little break, do 16 shows in Europe, take a break, do another 16, then see how we like it. I’m ready to get out there.’”
On top of that, he said he was also working with producers on a game show based on his 1993 No. 1 hit “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That),” which had been picked up by ABC in the US. Meat Loaf explained, “It’s really spectacular and really expensive. There’s ‘I would do anything for love’ and then there’s ‘I won’t do that’ — things like put a bowl of spiders on your head. It’ll be a bunch of stuff going on at the same time, so it’s like a Barnum And Bailey three-ring circus.”
He also noted that while he wouldn’t be hosting the show, he would have had a role on the program “like the color guy on the football games. They want me to be up on some throne on top of the whole thing. I’ll talk and interview people before they go into the game.”
Read more from the interview here.