Bad for Good
Bad for Good
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Bad for Good

Bad for Good is the only studio album by American songwriter Jim Steinman. It was released in April 1981. Steinman wrote all of the songs and performed on most, although Rory Dodd contributed lead vocals on some tracks.

The songs were originally intended to be recorded by Meat Loaf as a follow-up to Bat Out of Hell, titled Renegade Angel. However, Meat Loaf suffered vocal problems and was unable to sing. He would record several tracks from Bad for Good for his later albums.

Critical reaction to the album was mixed, with a majority of the criticism directed at Steinman's vocals. However, the album was a major commercial success, breaking the UK Top 10.

In the midst of the success of Bat Out of Hell, management and the record company put pressure on Steinman to stop touring in order to write a follow-up, provisionally titled Renegade Angel. Steinman joined Meat Loaf and his band for a live performance in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1978 with the intention of going through the songs for the new album after the show. However, someone broke into their dressing rooms during the show and stole several possessions, including the new lyric book. Many of the stolen songs would later appear on Bad for Good: "Surf's Up", "Left in the Dark" and "Out of the Frying Pan." Meat Loaf joked that he did not think Steinman ever got over that theft.

Meat Loaf lost his voice and was unable to record Renegade Angel. Steinman said "I spent seven months trying to make a follow-up [to Bat] with him, and it was an infernal nightmare. He had lost his voice, he had lost his house, and he was pretty much losing his mind." Not being able to "bear for people not to hear those songs," Steinman recorded the album, retitled Bad for Good, as a solo project, with Rory Dodd providing lead vocals on some songs. Many musicians and backing vocalists from Bat Out of Hell performed on Bad for Good, including Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.

Richard Corben illustrated the cover, as he had done for Bat Out of Hell. Describing the cover, Sounds magazine said "the flesh, the puppy-fat on the mid-calf, the breasts, the upturned American nose ... Corben's evocation of teenage femininity is so right! The cover, though, is the product of an alternative universe, like everything else about this album. The nude gymnasium scene is out, along with the other title 'Renegade Angel'."

Around this time, Steinman contributed all eight songs for Meat Loaf's album Dead Ringer, which was also released in 1981.

The first two songs, "Bad for Good" and "Lost Boys and Golden Girls", were two of many songs written by Steinman under the inspiration of Peter Pan and lost boys who never grow up. This is reflected in lyrics in "Bad for Good" such as "You know I'm gonna be like this forever: I'm never gonna be what I should." The composer says that Peter Pan has "always been about my favorite story and I've always looked at it from the perspective that it's a great rock 'n' roll myth because it's about – when you get right down to it – it's about a gang of lost boys who never grow up, who are going to be young forever and that's about as perfect an image for rock'n'roll as I can think of." "Lost Boys and Golden Girls" is the basis for the musical Neverland, which Steinman says is "a rock 'n' roll science fiction version of Peter Pan that takes place in a city built on the ruins of Los Angeles after a series of chemical wars." Neverland never got past the workshop stage, although Bat Out of Hell: The Musical, which premiered in 2017, is based on the same concept.

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