Every Song on Meat Loaf's 'Bat Out of Hell,' Ranked

Image via Epic Records/Richard Corben Published Nov 14, 2026, 12:18 PM EST Jeremy has more than 2900 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account Bat Out of Hell might not be your kind of thing if you're not particularly fond of classic rock music that pushes things to the absolute limits while being unafraid to get truly over-the-top, but if you are open to that kind of music, it’s paradise (maybe even by a dashboard light). It’s the album for which Meat Loaf is best-known, and honestly, fair enough. There was a second Bat Out of Hell (like, an actual sequel), and that one’s also good, truth be told. Then a third one… bit whatever. Meat Loaf is also well-remembered for some of his acting roles, like in Fight Club and then only a few minutes in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but Bat Out of Hell is big, flashy, and hard to ignore. Jim Steinman is someone you also need to mention when talking about Bat Out of Hell, since he wrote and composed all the songs on it, and though Meat Loaf had the necessary voice and stage presence for performing these songs, Steinman’s writing was one-of-a-kind and no one really created bombastic rock quite like him. And a third individual: Todd Rundgren, because the production of Bat Out of Hell is immense. And there are other people involved with the music here, like Roy Bittan (of the E Street Band) on keyboards and Ellen Foley doing backing vocals plus lead vocals on the penultimate track, but this has been enough preamble. Lots of people came together to make an album equal parts ridiculous and excellent here. There are seven songs on Bat Out of Hell, and all of them are ranked below, starting with the pretty good and ending with the all-time great. 7 "Heaven Can Wait" The closest thing to a weak track here, “Heaven Can Wait” is still good. Calling it the worst song on a great album is not the same thing as calling it a bad song. Also, within the context of the album, it serves a purpose. Bat Out of Hell is about 46 minutes long, and there are only seven songs, so a lot of them are lengthy as well as big in their sound. “Heaven Can Wait” is something of a breather, not being the only ballad on the album (see also the fifth and final track), but it is the quietest and least flashy ballad on the album. They’ll be addressed later in a bit more detail, but the first two songs on this album are explosive for a combined total of 15 minutes, and then “Heaven Can Wait” is a little bit of calm between that and some of the more energetic and/or passionate songs to come. It’s almost too slow, and yeah, even if you accept the part it plays within the broader album, it does still lack a certain oomph, but it’s kind of in service of something in any event. 6 "All Revved Up with No Place to Go" Well, “All Revved Up with No Place to Go” sure does sound like what you'd expect a song called with such a title to sound. It’s undeniable whiplash after “Heaven Can Wait,” almost feeling like an apology for the slowness of that song, but then at the same time, that apology overcompensates a bit. It is called “All Revved Up with No Place to Go,” yes, yet it’s still a bit chaotic. And it doesn’t really go anywhere like the other longer songs on the album. If the album falters ever so slightly, it’s with tracks #3 and #4 here, but they're the shortest ones on the album, and they don’t harm the enjoyment much. Then again, it is the shortest song on the album, and the song tries to rev you up while not really having any place to go, so what do you want? Can you really complain too much? It’s a bit more enjoyable than the previous song, not to mention it succeeds a little more as an upbeat song than “Heaven Can Wait” functioned as a slower and more downbeat song. The first half of Bat Out of Hell begins expertly, with the first two songs, and then side B is also pretty darn consistent. If the album falters ever so slightly, it’s with tracks #3 and #4 here, but they're the shortest ones on the album, and they don’t harm the enjoyment much. Things start and end very strong, and so if you're looking at Bat Out of Hell overall, that’s probably more important. 5 "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" As mentioned before, when addressing “Heaven Can Wait,” there are better ballads on Bat Out of Hell, and “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” is one of them. Funnily enough, two out of three ballads on this album are great, and that ain't bad. Whether this is a coincidence or intentional… who knows? Jim Steinman was clever. He titled the closest thing to an anti-climax on the album “All Revved Up with No Place to Go,” after all. Can’t really rule anything out on an album this gonzo, and with a writer quite like Steinman (who else could write “Total Eclipse of the Heart?” Not a Meat Loaf song, sure, but come on). “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” is great. It’s hard ranking it so low, but that does mean this is the point in said ranking where things start getting really good. It is a slow song, but maybe one of the least “rock” focused as a result, yet as far as ballads go, this is about as bombastic as they come. Meat Loaf sings it all in an over-the-top way, as he was so good at doing, and then instrumentally, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” also lays the melodrama on thick. Everyone commits, and so they make it work, even if you might look at it all (without listening) and, on paper, not really conceive how it could all come together in such a way (you could say the same about most of Bat Out of Hell, in all honesty). 4 "For Crying Out Loud" While not all were released in the U.S., five songs from Bat Out of Hell ultimately got released as singles, with “Heaven Can Wait” and “For Crying Out Loud” being the only ones that didn’t get that treatment. Both are appreciated within the context of the album, so maybe it makes some sense, and it’d also be hard to edit “For Crying Out Loud” down, since you do need the epic length here (it’s not far off nine minutes in duration) to properly appreciate what it does as an album closer. It's not as good as the title track on Prince's Purple Rain, sure, but “For Crying Out Loud” serves a similar purpose and has a comparable approach/structure. It’s the biggest of the Bat Out of Hell ballads, and the best of those somewhat slower songs. It’s still more than just a slow and/or quiet song, though, since “For Crying Out Loud” really explodes in its back half, and so it’s yet another song on this album that very much lives up to its title. Meat Loaf really cries out loud here, or at least does the singing equivalent of that, and the instrumentation more than backs him up, because “For Crying Out Loud” is genuinely orchestral. Jim Steinman's brand of rock is sometimes labeled symphonic, and here, that feels even more literal than usual. 3 "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" There are other songs on Bat Out of Hell that are a little more than tongue-in-cheek… no, actually, that label applies to all of them. Yet it’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” that’s the funniest song on the album, since it uses a rather fancy four-act structure to tell a story about a doomed relationship, but in, like, a funny way. The man is only in it for the physical side of such a relationship, while the woman wants him to dedicate himself to something meaningful, loving her until the end of time and all that. They both kind of get what they want, but then things fall apart. Spoilers for a song. Breaking it down in that way does it a disservice, ruining how funny it is (there’s also the baseball part, but that’s hard to explain without getting someone to just listen to the whole song). It’s a high-energy, exciting, and funny song, also standing out because much of it plays out as a duet between the two characters: one played by Meat Loaf, and the other by Ellen Foley. “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” is cinematic and definitely long enough to tell the kind of story some albums would have to spend all their songs telling lyrically. It’s like “Bohemian Rhapsody’s” sillier, longer, and more provocative younger brother. 2 "Bat Out of Hell" Ranking these three best songs on Bat Out of Hell is the trickiest part. “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” is better than the best song on most albums, and the same can be said about this album’s title track. This one, like that previously-mentioned penultimate song, uses a long track-length to have a few different movements and tell some kind of strange story, here being about a guy who is madly in love with a woman and with the act of driving a motorcycle very fast. Then he crashes and dies. The end. Spoilers, again, for a song. It’s harder to work out whether this is supposed to be funny, compared to the track-length joke that is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” (mostly with its lyrics), but “Bat Out of Hell” is still darkly funny in any event, just because of how over-the-top it is. And it’s funny while also being awesome. It’s an energizing song that well and truly earns the right to be nearly 10 minutes long, and it’s one thing to conclude an album with such a long and bombastic song (see “Jungleland” on Born to Run, which “Bat Out of Hell” does have some similarities to), but kicking things off with something this big and energetic, and then keeping the momentum going, for the most part, throughout? That’s something else entirely, and it is something that Bat Out of Hell succeeds in doing. 1 "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth" This song’s not far behind “Bat Out of Hell” in terms of energy and catharsis, with only a spoken-word intro being something of a buffer between the grandeur of “Bat Out of Hell” and the bombast of this second song. That spoken word intro on “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” is great, though. Cheesy, but in the best of ways. And it makes the explosion of the song itself, when it starts, hit all the more hard. It’s hard not to think about how much this sounds like a reworking of “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes, yet that is just about the best song of all time, so if you're going to steal and/or rework, may as well steal from – and rework – the best. It’s Jim Steinman writing a pop song, or something pop by his standard, because if you include that intro (Steinman himself does one of the voices in it), “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” is about five minutes long, and that’s about twice the length of a standard pop song (like, from the ‘60s and stuff). This is great stuff. It occupies an ideal middle ground between the ballads on Bat Out of Hell and the more extravagant and high-energy songs. It is, therefore, the most Bat Out of Hell of all the Bat Out of Hell songs, and that’s enough to also make it worth highlighting as the best of the Bat Out of Hell tracks.