The Curious Story of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’

I think it was Mark Lamarr who first cautioned against the idea of singing ‘turn around bright eyes’ in the company of a group of choirboys, but thankfully Bonnie Taylor’s smash 1983 hit ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ rises above such unfortunate innuendo. It’s a big brick out of the Wall of Sound and if any song of the 1980s deserves the label ‘power ballad’, surely this is it.

Origins

The song’s special magic is derived from several rather fortunate, and fortuitous, factors. First, there is Tyler’s voice: that distinctive rasp which was the result of an operation in the mid-1970s to remove nodules that had developed on her throat. Her 1970s partnership with Ronnie Scott (of the London jazz club) and Steve Wolfe came to an end when the hits dried up, and Tyler – seeking more freedom with the songs she performed – went looking for a new songwriter to work with.

It just so happens that Tyler saw Meat Loaf performing ‘Bat out of Hell’ live on the BBC TV music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test and liked the ‘big’ sound of Loaf’s music. So she got in touch with Loaf’s producer, Jim Steinman, to see if he was available to work with her. The two started working together, and ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ would become their most enduring collaboration.

Meaning

Perhaps the best commentary on the song’s meaning has come from Tyler herself, who told Record Mirror that she thought the song was about ‘someone who wants to love so badly she’s lying there in complete darkness’.

So, the song is about a longing for love, but being consigned to the dark, where there is no love to be found.

Or is it? One of the striking things about the song is how its lyrics hover between sadness and joy, between describing a state of lovelessness and painting a picture of perfect, passionate love.

On the one hand, the song’s lyrics talk of being terrified, restless, nervous, and angry. But all of these emotions are only experienced sporadically, or ‘every now and then’. The falling apart, too, is only now and then. Who puts her back together in the interim, then?

Because, on the other hand, the singer seems to find solace when she’s in her lover’s arms, or sees the look in his eyes. Love is her refuge from the darkness – and here, we might see ‘darkness’ as a metaphor for depression, fear, anxiety, a dark mood of anger, and all of the other things the lyrics suggest.

In short, then, the lyrics suggest that being together in each other’s arms and holding each other tight is the only way that the singer and her beloved can stave off the darkness and ‘make things right’.

Having said that, she also tells us that whilst she was falling in love ‘once upon a time’ (with all of the fairytale notions of perfect love that phrase summons), she’s now simply ‘falling apart’, suggesting a lost love rather than a found one.

But this doesn’t mean the lyrics make no sense. The clue lies in what follows the above lines in the chorus, where Tyler sings of how there was once light in her life but now love only exists in the dark.

In other words, when she was younger and in her prime, everything was joy and love and light and life; but now, the only place she finds love is in the darkness. And it’s a desperate kind of love: the only thing that keeps her together as she feels herself threatening to fall apart.

In an odd way, then, this is an affirmative message. The singer’s love means more, we might say, because it’s her one light in the darkness. Yes, it’s a love born of need, but then love can be born of worse things than need, and at least she genuinely values and appreciates her beloved for the light he brings.

A Gothic Hit

Steinman later included the song in his 1997 musical Dance of the Vampires, telling Playbill that the song was always a kind of ‘vampire long song’. Indeed, the song’s working title was ‘Vampires in Love’ (at the time, Steinman was working on a musical of Nosferatu). So before Twilight: Eclipse, there was ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.