In the late '70s, the field of talented songwriters was a densely crowded one. But few could write a meaningful, emotion-mining song with the dramatic grandeur and commercial appeal of Jim Steinman, who died on 19 April 2021 at age 73. His work with Meat Loaf—Steinman wrote all of the songs on his chart-topping 1977 debut, Bat Out of Hell—not only established his signature operatic-rock style, but basically defined what we know as the power ballad: opulent, deeply felt, maybe even a bit campy and over-the-top. For Steinman, that was sort of the point: big feelings don’t come tidily packaged; they take over the whole body, and they come out sobbing, beaming or screaming. Those sensations were amplified by some of pop’s literally strongest voices of all time: Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, Céline Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”, Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All”. But Steinman’s talents didn’t just suit balladeers and soft-rock giants. His songwriting and production on goth pioneers The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland—theatrical, richly textured, unexpectedly soulful—gave the genre even more complexity, boosting its elements of fantasy while also expressing aspects of the human condition head-on.