Meat Loaf
Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

THE REVIEW

When I think of Meatloaf, the classic big man with long hair and the attitude and clothing of a typical rebellious American rocker comes to mind, but with those four chins and those extra thirty kilos that clash with the ideal canon of a sex symbol.

Mr. Meatloaf in the seventies, before finally falling apart with the usual drug-alcohol saga, had a great voice. Not the most powerful, but in his only memorable album, “Bat out of Hell,” (which sold 25 million copies), his voice divine illuminated the compositions of the great Jim Steinman, an excellent pianist and composer, author of many hits and - not everyone knows - the father of the (in my opinion) wonderful pop song “Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” sung by the lady with the sandpaper voice, Bonnie Tyler. Meatloaf sang in a particular way: a mix between a tenor singing a hard-rock song with just one lung, Liza Minnelli, Roy Orbison, clinging to high notes with desperate tenderness and singing the low ones with a very "alcoholic" pathos. But it is when I listen to the song I am about to review that my legs start to feel like small dry branches bending in the wind, like a friendly breath trying to extinguish from the start a flame in the heart that I have never managed to fully put out.

At 15 years old, I met someone who managed to break the monotony of my last holidays at the sea with my parents. I saw those two eyes, the color of which I have not been able to find again and never will, even if I were able to fly and see in a day all the existing seas and skies. That golden body and that hair, that scent that burned my sleepless nights and my tired, muffled days, in which the burning sand turned to ice as soon as it touched my frail body destroyed by the cruel awareness that never, ever would I be able to snatch a minimum physical contact, an evening alone on the beach of her hateful father's establishment. It was as if I lived in a hell made of poisonous sugar, of little hopes immediately destroyed by reality, of phrases choked in my throat. The song in question, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad,” means all this. I listened to it in the hotel lobby right as those eyes struck me. It was as if I was making a parallel journey, in which after the emblematic piano intro, Meatloaf recounted what I would experience in two weeks. The music and words intertwine in a plot that starts quietly but grows, stops again, starts over and ends; never banally, where the verses and the chorus are indissolubly linked by a melodic logical thread that I would never stop listening to, where in a rock ballad - although practically devoid of electric guitars - the strings are like small scalpels that intervene at the right moment, that is when Meatloaf explains to the woman who loves him that he "wants her, desires her, but there’s no way he can fall in love with her and don’t cry because two out of three ain’t bad…." And Meatloaf tells this girl his experience, in a mirrored plot, meaning that what he just told her was once told to him by the girl he could not love back then.

It was in that damned mirror I saw my life as my father’s car took us back to Rome. The Eagles in “Desperado” sang that “you always want what you can’t have,” and everyone knows this, at least I believe so. Meatloaf says that "you’ll never find a ruby in a mountain of rocks, never find gold on a sandy beach." I can only confirm it. Wonderful song, like that shade of color I am still searching for.