Had a fresh listen to this blast of heroic pop today. The songwriter and producer Jim Steinman, best known for his work with Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler, helmed the two songs that bookend the 1984 movie Streets of Fire. Laurie Sergeant (of Face to Face and Twinemen) and Holly Sherwood are, in force, the singing voice of the character Ellen Aim (played by Diane Lane), and Sherwood nails the lead on the film’s climactic song, “Tonight is What it Means to be Young.”
(Note: This song is about the promise of a better future after stormy times, and the video distorts this in its use of every last violent frame of the movie. Please keep that in mind as you listen. Spoiler alert: it also shows pretty much the whole movie.)
Gotta love the nod to Ultravox at the instrumental bridge, about halfway in. The Ultravox album Quartet came out about a year before production would have begun on Streets of Fire, and “Tonight is What it Means to be Young” owes some of its majesty to Ultravox’s “Visions in Blue.”
Steinman brilliantly orchestrates (and the great Bob Clearmountain mixes) what could so easily be a soupy mess, with voice after voice after voice layered atop bass, piano, synthesizer (courtesy of Synergy’s Larry Fast), programmed drums, electronic percussion, and other “assorted keyboards.” That’s the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan pounding the ivory—chase that fade!
A common studio trick for thickening the sound of vocals is to use what’s known as doubling, in which a singer records the same part twice, performing it virtually the same both times. It’s like a micro-choir of one. In his songs for Streets of Fire, Steinman tends to double different singers with voices of similar character, creating something like a new, composite lead voice. (The first four verses are, of course, Sherwood by herself.) Background vocals are another matter entirely, and on this song a separate credit is given to a trio of Sherwood and the Meat Loaf vets Rory Dodd and Eric Troyer for arranging and singing all parts: composite lead, myriad interwoven solo parts, and massed choir. A tour de force of writing, arranging, and performing, by all parties.
17 October 2014