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Thank you for demonstrating the complexity of this song and showing the genius of Jim Steinman.

Man Aron.. Thanks so much. Sometimes it's the middle of the night you and just wanna be able to find someone who shares the same awe of a subject as you. And here we are. Your love for the perfection of the song and then to be able to explain it and have a fun conversation whilst doing it.. Is just so good. Thanks a lot dude.

This should have 10 million views

Even though I like very much Meat Loaf, I am very happy that Bonnie Tyler did this song. It's the wedding of a unique voice with a unique song. P.S.I like your piano version also very much

What a splendid breakdown. As a rock guitarist (the early comment amused me greatly) and Steinman worshipper, the structure of this song has always blown me away. And as a rock guitarist, I never really had a bloody clue what was happening in the mad flurry of chords. Thanks :)

Looks like Jim may well have seen this video as he mentions such a clip in the speech he gave over the weekend when he went back to his old college of Amhurst. Check the college website for the hour long audio and you might be surprised by what he has to say.Its funny Really enjoy this song analysis my self

I have just watched your whole video from start to finish and was enthralled. Wonderful analysis of an amazing song. You are very talented.

"Someone must have blessed us when he gave us those songs." Yes, and his name is Jim Steinman. I'm not musically minded, and a lot of the chord progressions went over my head, but I just know a cracking good song when I hear one, and love Steinman's work. Thank you so much for even *attempting* to get inside his head and explaining this beautiful and complex song!

You're the british version of Rick Beato. I had you tagged for another music piece and today I came back from a night shift and started browsing and could absolutely not stop listening to this. Thank you..

i just found a bit in an interview with jim where he talks about this - awesome -

That was a fantastic work man, thanks a lot for this

this was just recently (on friday) mentioned on air by NPR O_O and it really blew me away. I love learning about the significance of these chord progressions.

Thank you, Love Steinman, Loved the way you explained this, if you're ever in Perth (West Australia) pop around for a beer anytime mate ;) Ta for this.

Thank you for sharing this!! Absolutely loved watching it!

In a perfect world I would like to see each and every person who critiques a song or performance justify their opinion thus.

Awesome video! I really enjoyed! I was watching a video by Signals Music Studio about key changes and he mentioned this song but didn't explain it. So glad I found your video!

So glad i found this fantastic video .. Great job

This was great. Thanks Aaron

@27:27 actually dude, I don't know if you know the long version (from the album), but there actually is a second version after the instrumental section. It was removed from the single because of time constraints, but if you haven't yet, you should check it out. Great video.

I believe you are right. What kind words and what an entertaining talk. Thank you.

A wonderful appreciation. I didnt think i could love this song anymore.

Brilliant dissection - loved it!

RIP Jim Steinman,

Thank you for sharing... you shaved a lot of work off my learning this.

It's 10 years later. Please do some more song analysis.

Love this. Thank you

Okay, I've not read any of the comments below but watching this video is a half hour freaking master class! I am a songwriter with very limited (almost none) formal training but now I don't feel as crazy and worried about some of the stuff I do! I am in the process of working though a new song and was questioning how many sections I seemed to have and some of the chord changes I'm using and now, even if I can't remember all of the explanations, feel more comfortable with what I'm doing. What a great half hour. Saving and sharing!

According to Wikipedia Steinman said its original title was "Vampires in Love"written for a musical based on Nosferatu. He also denied it being written for Meatloaf, but come on! You can tell this (an Making Love Out of Nothing at All) is a Meatloaf song! Especially the album version where you can tell it was written for a second singer.

I was just listening to this song and thinking to myself "what is it that makes this song so good? It's something to do with the chord progressions, but I can't explain it. Maybe there is someone on the internet who can." And lo, I found your video. Thanks for analyzing!

"once upon a time I was falling in love" .. the C major chord is there both times (not Eb and then C) .. listen to the isolated piano track, it's obvious :) By the way, the piano in this song is just stunning, the guy never plays anything the same way twice. Sadly, it gets lost in the full arrangement of the song.

@dsmith7000 by golly you're right! And the Eb on a G I think the second time. That bass guitar gunning out those third notes (and refusing to give us solid roots) gives that breathless feeling I mentioned, and does it even better than I realised!

JS layed out the Chord structure... and Professor Bittan played it

Brilliant!

Very interesting video, especially to me who never had a formal music education. Thank you. BTW, you should totally do a duet of this song with Pixietoria.

Wrong...Jim Steinman has said on many occasions that the song was not meant for Meatloaf, and he wrote it for Bonnie. I can find many quotes online to back that up.

That was great work. Thanks. Even though I never appreciated the single version😉

Love Jim's music and love this analysis. Great job! I agree that the Ab release in section 3 is ingenious & perfect. Just to help in section 4, it's an F bass under the Db and G bass under the Eb.

Aaron does a good job explaining the overall structure of the song, but the explanation of the E chord at the start of the "And I need you now, tonight" line could be made clearer; it's not as surprising as he makes it sound. Interested parties, bear with me for a moment. If this is tl;dr, just skip my comment as a bunch of boring music theory gibberish. The song begins (arguably) with a B flat minor chord, but it's not in the key of B flat minor. It's in the key of C#. (It could be called D flat as well, but let's stick with C# since the "#" symbol is easier to access on a keyboard than the flat symbol is.) This is the key that uses all five "black keys" on the piano. In that key signature, B flat minor is thought of as A# minor. The song's opening chord progression is A#minor- G#major- A#minor- G#major- C#major, with the C#major coming at the beginning of the third "Turn around." This is a pretty standard pop music chord progression: vi-V-vi-V-I. Some of you might note that the keys of B flat minor and C# major have all the same notes, but just because the song starts on B flat minor (or, as we'll be calling it, A#minor), that doesn't meant the song is in that key. Looking at the first verse as a whole, by the time of the third "Turn around," the melody is clearly resolving to the tonic chord for a moment, with the notes for that third "Turn around" walking up the C# major scale: do-re-mi. So we're in the key of C#major, not B flat minor (or A#minor). The next chord (starting on the third appearance of the word "little") is a B chord, which is mildly surprising. The seventh note in a major scale is usually half a step down from the tonic, so in C# (which raises all pitches one semitone above the usual C scale) that note would be a B#, which is enharmonic with a C note since there's no "black note" between B and C. But in this case, rather than a B# (=C), we have a B natural (or, if you like, a C flat) chord. The major scale for C would end with B natural before returning to C: C-D-E-F-G-A-B. C# raises all of those values a semitone: C#-D#-E#-F#-G#-A#-B#. (Again, B# is played as C on the keyboard, but it's not serving as a C when you're in the key of C#.) But in this song, we don't have a B# during the third "Turn around" line; instead, we have a B natural. B natural is not the seventh degree of the major scale for C#. But it is the seventh degree of the myxolydian scale for C#. (The Myxolydian scale for C natural is C-D-E-F-G-A-B flat.) This appearance of the myxolydian scale in the song is a little surprising at this point, since we've already seen the notes A# and B# in the song (alternating on the line "never coming round" for instance). But it's not a huge shocker, as many rock songs use myxolydian mode completely or partially. So now we have a song that was using the notes A# and B# heavily, and now it's strongly featuring the semitone between them, B natural. This introduces lots of interesting possibilities for where the song could go. Most rock songs don't venture further afield; the myxolydian "flat seventh" note is just a bit of flavor in an otherwise predictable major scale. But Steinman uses it as a pivot point into a new, related, key signature. The third and fourth "Turn around" lines alternate between the tonic chord and the myxolydian seventh: C#major -Bmajor -C#major -Bmajor to establish a strong myxolydian feel. The melody goes there too; the line-ending words "and cry" are on the notes B-C#. The fourth "Turn around" is melodically and chordally almost identical to the third, which sets you up to expect that it, too (on the words "your eyes") will also end B-C#, resolving once again to the C#major tonic chord. So here's where the first real surprise of the song hits, which as Aaron correctly notes is that the chord under the word "eyes" (overlapping the fifth "Turn Around") doesn't go to C#; it goes to E natural (not only as a chord, but as the new tonic chord), which isn't even in the key of C#, which as I said goes C#-D#-E#... skipping E altogether. Now, Aaron notes that an E major chord would have been surprising in the context of a B flat minor (=A#minor) chord. But we haven't seen one of those chords since the second "Turn Around." Instead we've been seeing C# and B, both as notes and major chords. And both of those notes are strong components of the key of E major. In fact, in the key of E major, a B major chord is the "dominant" chord, the second strongest chord in the key. Our ears are very used to song phrases which end by going from the dominant chord to the tonic: V-I. In fact, this ending used to be pretty much required in European songs, for hundreds of years. So that B major chord is pivoting from being the flattened seventh of a myxolydian scale in C# major, to now being the dominant chord (V chord) in the key of E major, the song's new key. To sum up, the C# major and B major chords have made us completely forget about that A#minor chord at the beginning of the song, so that the switch to E major is now not far at all; our brains accept it as a pleasing event. Something similar happens next, on the fifth and sixth "Turn around," which have the same text: "Turn around, bright eyes." The fifth "Turn around" has chords E and A (=I and iv) with notes G#, F#, and E (mi, re, do) figuring heavily in the melody, ending on G# (mi). That ending G# note is the third degree of the E major scale and thus has a "sweet" sound to our ears. We like musical lines that end on the first, third, or fifth degree of the scale (do, mi, or sol). The sixth "Turn Around" is another fake-out, though. The melody starts out identically, setting us up to expect an identical resolution. But two things happen. First, where the word "apart" in the fifth "Turn around" went down to the tonic and then back up again to the third (F#-E-F#-G#), the "apart" in the sixth "Turn around" just goes up to the third and stays there (F#-G#). But more importantly, the underlying chords, which went A-E last time, go A major -G#major this time, and the melody proceeds on in the key of G# major. That key change from E major to G# major, and the accompanying chord change from A major down a semitone to G# major, would have been hard to swallow if the melody line were not sitting on a G# note, which has gone from being the third degree of the key of E major to being the first degree of the new key of G#. So the E chord may be a long way from where the song started, but it's not too far from where the song was the moment before it was played. I supposed that would have made the video even longer to explain all this, which does not detract from the good job Aaron did in explaining the song as a whole.

Great job Aaron. The only thing I would, or could possibly, add to your analysis is to say that Jim Steinman has always been very clear about the facts that certain songs are written for certain genders... so he always viewed Total Eclipse as being for a female singer. Another example is "It's all coming back to me now"... if you want to check that out, take a look at Celine Dion's version. I'm not a Dion fan at all, but it's the best version of the song. Meatloaf did a cover of it, and (just my opinion) murdered it by turning it into a duet. Anyway, thanks for the interesting thirty minutes!

good god, that was great !

If you listen to the song the bit where it goes ‘now there’s only love in the dark’. The C chord is used both times not just the second.

I can you tell why Bonnie Tyler sang this song. According to a Jim Steinman interview, Meat Loaf had lost his voice after the Bat Out Of Hell album and the song went to Bonnie Tyler when he produced her album Faster Than The Speed Of Night.

I didn't know that, but it would explain a lot about the video for the song.

and Nicki French mad it a amazing hit ! show the song can test the years to come! if played and sang correctly

I am not musically trained, so could someone please explain in layman’s terms what is happening with the melody during the first “every now and then I fall apart” before it repeats the “turn around” first section. I used to sing this song (very mediocrely) and that always tripped me up vocally.

"Every now and then I get a little bit -nervous- *lonely* and you're never comin' round"

MESSAGE FROM AARON WILDE please check out my own latest song here (click me to go to the Captain Wilde channel), taken from my 2017 Album "Astronaut", available from CD Baby and all other online music sites. Enjoy!

So... How many keys does he use in the song? How man key changes? Think I counted 7??

Please can you do this to the Bat out of hell songs?

Good breakdown. Have a few disagreements here and there. I think I have an insightful theory as to why Meatloaf didnt sing it. A marketing measure - at the time Bat out of Hell had been high in the album charts for 5 years and still going strong. Could there have been a feeling that were there to be anything else really successful from Meatloaf at that time it would have detracted sales (it proved a big hit for Tyler or course). The beginning of the end of the chart Marathon of BOOH was soon after their moderately successful chart single in September and October

Jim writes that incredible song and then 20 years later a creepy band called Westlife perform it and get credit !!

17.:34. Wow. Cool.

NOOO! Song was published in 1983. And Tanz der Vampire was made in 1997... the song existed long time ago and steinman reused it in his great musical

I sat here through 30 minutes of gibber jabber, hoping to hear you sing and play straight through, because what I did hear, sounded awesome, but then you started explaining... Verbosely explaining. Hope you made another video of you just singing and playing, straight through, though if so, I will likely NEVER find it.

Wasn't it written for Tanz der vampire as opposed to for a single artist?

I've not heard the Westlife version

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, what the fuck this is so long its like a 4 minute song.

This is a great tutorial. Sorry to be that guy but... There is an incorrect chord. The chord on "total" in the "total eclipse of the heart" is not what you have played. It's suppose to be a strange augmented/or something else chord that is in All the recording but not in any piece of sheet music. Awesome work though!