Long name. Long song, at 11:58. It’s more than twice as long as most pop songs. But worth the listen. The music video is 7:41, still long but also missing over 4 minutes. There is also a single edit at 5:17, I think, which is still long for a pop song, but this is the full version at a second or two shy of 12 minutes.

This is the first track from Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, which was either the first or second CD I owned (the other being the soundtrack for The Bodyguard with Whitney Houston, who also leads the soundtrack). I know the third CD I owned was No More Tears by Ozzy Osbourne, which says a lot about my music tastes back then. Fantasy rock, R&B, and British hard rock.

I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) was incredibly popular when it was new, and also controversial. To this day, a lot of people say they don’t understand what it is he won’t do for love, even though it’s pretty plainly stated in the lyrics. I wonder if they’re saying the length of the song made them lose interest before “that” was revealed. So, I’ll tell you what “that” is.

The song is about an immortal being of some sort who has unspecified power. He’s lived a solitary life until one day he falls in love with a mortal. This is more along the lines of the video; the song could either be taken this way, or you could just assume it’s all metaphorical. I assume it’s the former because the video is so cool. Anyway, for most of the song, he’s pledging to love this person forever. Toward the end of the song, a second singer comes in, and she’s asking him for things he can do, and he says “I can do that,” to all of them as the requests get more and more fantastical. It’s the last request he refuses. She tells him after so many years, she will die and he will forget her, and she demands he promise to move on and love again. That’s what he says he won’t do. She says after she’s turned to dust, he’ll fall in love again, and he says he won’t.

It’s probably not the first time this tale has been told, and it wasn’t the last. The Japanese film Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms told a similar story. It’s about a nearly-immortal elf who is separated from her people, and she finds a baby boy in danger and saves his life, then raises her as his son. She appears to be 15 or 16, and never ages, through the boy’s whole life into manhood and old age. And then of course you have the Elves from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings who were there for the original war with Sauron, and who are still there to guide Frodo, and the Elven woman who falls in love with Aragorn. The more recent Japanese series Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is about a childlike Elven sorceress who finishes a ten-year adventure with a crew of humans, and is somewhat surprised when, after so many years, they all die, so she takes on a new apprentice. The tale of Elves and other long-lived beings outliving humans they have relationships with in various forms is an old one, and one that will continue to be told.

Side note: I remember looking at the album cover of the CD and wondering who Jim Steinman is. I thought maybe he was part of the band. No, he’s a songwriter, and he has performed a few of his own songs, but he largely writes for other people. Mostly Meat Loaf, but he’s also written songs for Bonnie Tyler, Céline Dion, The Everly Brothers, Barbara Streisand, Air Supply, and more. In fact, one day I was listening to my 90s playlist, and It’s All Coming Back to Me Now by Céline Dion came on, and I thought, “this sounds like a Meat Loaf song, I bet Jim Steinman wrote it.” Checked the credits, and to no surprise, he did. Very similar energy to the Meat Loaf songs. Another Meat Loaf song to check out, along the same lines as this one, but more rooted in reality, is Paradise by the Dashboard Light. That one’s the opposite, it’s about a guy and girl making out in a car while a baseball game plays on the radio (the narrator ends up narrating their acts), and just before he’s about to “hit home plate” as it were, she stops him and makes him promise to stay with her until the end of time… and after many years, he’s looking back and “praying for the end of time”. Good song. Also quite long, but not 12 minutes long.