1984 · Behind the Songs
Jim Steinman gave her seven minutes of thunder, a cheating heart, and her first video made for MTV.
The recording in context
By 1984, Barbra Streisand had not made a studio album of contemporary pop in four years, and the landscape had changed around her. MTV was rewriting the rules of stardom, the power ballad was becoming the decade’s signature form, and the theatrical rock of Jim Steinman — the man behind Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell — was suddenly the sound of the moment. For her twenty-third studio album, Emotion, released that October on Columbia, Streisand did something unexpected: she handed the opening slot, and the lead single, to Steinman himself. The song was “Left in the Dark,” a seven-minute thunderclap he had first recorded for his own lone solo album, Bad for Good, in 1981.
Steinman was an odd fit for Streisand on paper and a perfect one in practice. His songs were mini-operas — all revving engines, desperate lovers, and kitchen-sink romanticism — and he produced them like a man scoring films that did not exist yet. “Left in the Dark” was pure Steinman: a power ballad about a woman who comes home to find her partner with someone else, built to escalate from a whisper to a scream. He had cut it himself in 1981 without setting the world on fire; handing it to the greatest interpretive singer of the age was, in retrospect, the song’s destiny.
She recorded it on June 18, 1984, splitting sessions between the Power Station in New York and the Village in Los Angeles, with Steinman himself producing. Sharp-eared listeners will recognize the record’s opening: that percussive, clattering synth intro was lifted from “All Night Long,” a Billy Squier track Steinman had produced earlier the same year. It was a signature move — Steinman recycling his own thunder — and it announced immediately that this was not a standard Streisand ballad. This was a rock record that happened to have the best voice in pop singing it.
Listen closely
The lyric is a three-act play in seven minutes. A woman walks in on betrayal, and instead of collapsing, she gets articulate — Steinman’s heroines always do. Streisand plays it like the actress she is, moving from disbelief to fury to something like triumph, and her voice, famously precise, finds new grit in the louder passages. When she leans into the chorus, you can hear her enjoying the sheer physicality of it, the way a great stage performer enjoys a big second act. It is the most un-Streisand-like single she ever released, which is precisely why it works: she commits to Steinman’s world completely, without a wink.
Sonically, the record is all about scale. The verses are tense and close-miked, the choruses enormous, with stacked backing vocals and guitars that owe more to Meat Loaf than to anything in her catalogue. At seven minutes and twelve seconds on the album — trimmed to just over six for the seven-inch — it was among the longest singles she ever released. There is even a forty-four-second “Intro” on the single, as if the song needed an overture. It did: “Left in the Dark” does not begin so much as it detonates, and Streisand rides the explosion like she was born to it.
Then there was the video — and in 1984, the video was half the battle. “Left in the Dark” was the first Streisand video conceived expressly for MTV, filmed over three days in Los Angeles that September and directed by Jonathan Kaplan, the filmmaker behind The Accused. Kris Kristofferson played the straying lover in a six-minute mini-movie about a lounge singer caught in a love triangle. It was glossy, dramatic, and utterly of its moment — Streisand, the classicist, meeting the eighties on their own flickering terms. MTV played it, and for a few weeks, the most old-school singer in pop was a video star.
The charts, though, were unmoved by the spectacle. The single peaked at number 50 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 37 on Cash Box — respectable, but a far cry from her chart-topping days. Abroad it did a little better in spots: number 27 in Australia, 20 in the Netherlands, 27 in Belgium, 85 in Britain, 87 in Canada. Cash Box, reviewing it, praised the “dramatic ballad” and her “inimitably sensational” vocals, delivered with “soulful intensity.” The numbers told a cooler story: Streisand’s audience, it seemed, preferred her without the thunder — a verdict the rest of the Emotion album, which retreated to safer ground, appeared to accept.
The afterlife
Steinman never let a good song go, and “Left in the Dark” eventually came home: Meat Loaf recorded it for 1995’s Welcome to the Neighbourhood, giving it the full Bat Out of Hell treatment it had always implied. In Sweden, Cecilia Vennersten cut a Swedish-language version, “Lämnad i mörkret,” the same year. Neither eclipsed Streisand’s original, which remains the definitive reading — the one where the song’s theatrical excess meets a voice disciplined enough to contain it. It sits in her catalogue like a lightning strike in a formal garden: startling, a little out of place, and impossible to forget once you’ve seen it.
History has been kinder to the record than the charts were. It captures a fascinating collision: the most controlled singer of her generation surrendering to the most excessive songwriter of his, and both of them better for it. The Emotion album would be remembered as a transitional record; “Left in the Dark” is its bravest moment. Play it loud, as Steinman intended, and hear what happens when thunder meets precision — the thunder learns manners, and the precision learns to roar.