Everything Was Glorious, Everything Was Shabby

Bonnie Tyler, R.I.P.

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” was one of the first pop songs I ever loved, but the first time I heard it, it was in Estonian. (Don’t ask.) Later, I heard a parody in which somebody sang a narration of the events of the song’s very silly, very eighties music video. That was when I realized that the Estonian song I vaguely remembered had some kind of larger existence. And so it was that I finally listened to the version that everybody knows, the one sung by Bonnie Tyler.

I don’t mind saying that everything about Tyler’s version of the song baffled me when I first heard it. Her voice was so raspy that she sounded like singing gave her actual pain. Her feathered hair, heavy eyeliner, and incredible levels of blush—her whole aesthetic, much like the song itself, existed in some place beyond concepts like “dated,” one that had never existed to become dated at all. To me, at that age, she did not represent somebody who embodied a look that had once been fashionable. By then I was familiar with the moment in eighties movies when somebody would be “made over” into a look that no longer looked better to the audience, but much worse. Bonnie Tyler was something else. She looked and she sounded like a maniac from some other world. She was like Dolly Parton if Dolly Parton came out of the underworld instead of Tennessee.

None of that meant I didn’t listen to the song. I listened to it constantly. I sang it often. I made fun of it and I listened to it again. She sounded like a frog, the lyrics of the song were undeniably stupid, and I had never been in love with anybody (disastrously or otherwise), but none of that mattered. You could make fun of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” all day, every day, but something about the song always survived the jokes.

“Total Eclipse of the Heart” was Tyler’s song, but she didn’t write it. It came out of a creative partnership with Jim Steinman, a songwriter for whom “bombastic” is probably too mild a term, who produced her album Faster Than the Speed of Night in 1983. Steinman’s songs could easily approach eight minutes long; one, Meat Loaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That),” is twelve minutes long. Yet those twelve minutes zoom by, as Meat Loaf swears to a cynical woman that the one thing he’ll never do, even for love, is stop dreaming about her. Even if Steinman’s songs were mostly about bad relationships, they felt like they were the kind of bad relationships that took place between gods on Mount Olympus, if those gods were also somehow broke and lonely people with dead-end lives. Everything was glorious; everything was shabby.

That contrast is why Bonnie Tyler is the ideal singer of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” When I first heard it, I don’t think I really understood that in music the goal is not to sound as beautiful as possible. That harsh voice, which I found so odd, is what keeps “Total Eclipse of the Heart” from sailing off into realms of self-parody. Somebody like Celine Dion sang other Jim Steinman songs with conviction, but if she’d done “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” her voice would have been too beautiful. The narrator of this song was suffering tremendously, in the throes of a love that’s “like a shadow on [her] all of the time.” You needed a voice that communicated that agony. My first reaction was right: Tyler sounded like it hurt her to sing. That’s how you need to sound if you’re going to pull this stunt off.

It always seemed disrespectful to the kind of performer Tyler was to learn much about her. Like Bette Davis, she belonged to a type of star whose appeal was that she was a little scary. She wasn’t a singer-songwriter who cultivated a knowable persona or a personal mythology. I know she was Welsh, and I’ve never learned much else. I have no idea who she was when she washed off the eyeliner or gave her hair a break. I went on to appreciate her other songs, like her Steinman-penned duet with Todd Rundgren, “Loving You’s A Dirty Job (But Somebody’s Got to Do It).” And even though she’s died, the Bonnie Tyler that first fascinated me will never fade away; she’ll always be there, on the records and in the music video, with her great mane of hair, her armor of rogue, and her perfectly ruined voice.

Read this essay on the website of The Lamp.