BONNIE'S Best
Bonnie Tyler has learned to swim. It’s something she’d always wanted to do but simply hadn’t gotten around to, so in the final year of her 60s, unable to tour during the pandemic, she decided to swim. Such forward thinking and determination is all part of who the hitmaking Welsh singer has always been. Her hopefulness and eye toward the future come through in her perfectly title new album, The Best Is Yet to Come. It was really always there in all her previous 17 albums over a singing career spanning half a century.
Tyler was already quite well-known in Europe, thanks to her 1976 hit “Lost in France,” but it was the 1978 release of “It’s a Heartache” that broke her in America with a gloriously raspy (or as she calls it, “husky”) voice that has become her distinctive trademark. Vocal cord surgery in her 20s had rendered her voice that way, and in typical Tyler optimism, she took a sad song and made it better by embracing the very thing that might have made other singers leave the practice of music altogether.
It was a great song rendered perfectly by someone who knew both how to sing beautifully and broken at the same time. It sounded like a heartache.
The next single, the excellent “Here Am I,” was embraced by audiences across Europe, particularly Germany, though it didn’t do anything in the States. But Tyler was by no means done with America.
She was a big fan of the songs Jim Steinman wrote for Meat Loaf, whose Bat Out of Hell album (written entirely by Steinman) had taken rock and roll into a new territory of epic songs with grandiose vocals and arrangements. Tyler’s voice was perfect for Steinman’s musical vision.
Steinman produced her fifth album,, and he wrote a song especially for her called “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” It was and is the ultimate power ballad in the hands of the ultimate power ballad singer. It came out during the heyday of MTV, and there was Tyler looking majestic and beautiful in the video in a white dress, her blond hair windblown, singing with equal parts strength and devastation. This heartache was so much bigger.
