1983 · Behind the Songs
A Jim Steinman ballad, rewritten for Manilow — and his last trip into the Top 40.
By the autumn of 1983, Barry Manilow was at a crossroads familiar to every pop star who had owned the previous decade. The piano-driven ballads that made him a household name — “Mandy,” “I Write the Songs,” “Looks Like We Made It” — belonged to a softer era, and radio was changing around him. What he needed was not another song in the old mold but a jolt: something dramatic, outsized, and just dangerous enough to remind listeners what a Manilow performance could feel like. He found it in the most unlikely place — in the songbook of Jim Steinman — the very writer who had created the song for someone else entirely.
Written for Meat Loaf
“Read ’Em and Weep” was never meant for Barry Manilow. Jim Steinman wrote it with Meat Loaf in mind, and the rock singer recorded it for Dead Ringer, his 1981 album — one of only two tracks on that record produced by Steinman himself alongside Jimmy Iovine. Released as a single in November 1981 in the United States, with a British release following on March 12, 1982, the Meat Loaf version carried all the thunder of its writer’s style: big, bruised, and unapologetically theatrical. It was a fine record, but it was not a major hit, and the song might have stayed a footnote in the Steinman catalog — one more dramatic ballad in a career built on dramatic ballads — if Manilow’s team had not gone looking for exactly that kind of drama two years later.
Rewritten for Manilow
Manilow did not simply cover the song; he and Steinman rebuilt it. Released in November 1983 as one of three brand-new recordings on Manilow’s Greatest Hits Vol. II, the new “Read ’Em and Weep” was produced by Steinman himself and reshaped into something sleeker and more pop — less barroom thunder, more late-night ache. Steinman even wrote fresh lyrics for the second half of the second verse and made small adjustments to the first verse and the final chorus, tailoring the song’s melodrama to Manilow’s voice rather than Meat Loaf’s. The single, backed with “One Voice,” arrived with an unusual pedigree: a greatest-hits package that was secretly a comeback vehicle, and a rock writer producing a pop singer at the peak of his interpretive powers.
Six weeks at number one
American radio embraced the record immediately — at least, adult radio did. “Read ’Em and Weep” climbed to number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and stayed there for six weeks, and it topped the Canadian adult chart as well. On the broader Billboard Hot 100, it peaked at number 18 in early 1984, while in Britain it reached number 17. Those numbers tell a precise story about where Manilow stood in 1983 and 1984: still royalty on the stations that had always loved him, still capable of crossing over, but no longer the automatic Top 10 fixture he had been in the late seventies. The six-week AC reign was the real headline — a reminder that when Manilow connected with a lyric, his core audience stayed with him all the way.
The last Top 40 hit
There is a poignancy to the chart peak that only hindsight provides. Number 18 on the Hot 100 made “Read ’Em and Weep” Manilow’s final visit to the Billboard Top 40 — the closing bracket on a run of pop-chart success that had begun a full decade earlier with “Mandy.” Nobody knew it at the time, of course; in early 1984 it simply looked like another strong showing from a dependable star. But as the eighties wore on and pop radio moved toward synthesizers and new faces, Manilow’s center of gravity shifted to the adult-contemporary world and the concert stage, where it remains. The song endures as a farewell of sorts — not a planned one, but the kind the charts write for you.
A second life for a songwriter’s song
For Steinman, the song’s second act was its own quiet vindication. Writers live for the moment a song outgrows its first singer, and “Read ’Em and Weep” did exactly that — traveling from a hard-rock album track to the top of the adult-contemporary world in the hands of a singer nobody would have predicted. The collaboration also said something about Manilow’s instincts as an interpreter. He had built his career on his gifts as an interpreter of other people’s material — and he understood that a great lyric could come from anywhere, even from rock’s theater of excess. By handing Steinman the producer’s chair, he let the song keep its drama while giving it a new frame.
What to listen for
Listen to how the record balances its two fathers. The Steinman DNA is everywhere — in the wounded grandeur of the melody, in the way the arrangement keeps threatening to boil over. But the Manilow treatment smooths the edges without dulling them: the vocal is pure storyteller, leaning into the lyric’s letter-reading conceit rather than shouting it. Pay attention to the rewritten second verse, where Steinman’s new lines give the narrator a sharper, sadder self-awareness than the Meat Loaf original allowed. And notice the final chorus, slightly reworked, landing like a door closing softly instead of slamming. It is a master class in adaptation — proof that a great song is not a fixed object but a script, and that the right actor can make it entirely his own.
Four decades on, “Read ’Em and Weep” sits in a curious corner of the Manilow catalog: too dramatic for the easy-listening compilations, too polished for the rock histories, and all the better for it. It captures a singular moment when one of pop’s great interpreters borrowed fire from rock’s great dramatist and made something neither could have made alone. The charts gave it six weeks at the top of one world and a final wave goodbye from another — a last Top 40 bow for a singer who had defined the format. The song deserved both endings.