Artist · chart history · #514 in indie & aaa artist polls
Meat Loaf
Solo artist Dallas United States
Meat Loaf is an artist from Dallas. Meat Loaf has 138 chart appearances on 86 radio countdowns from 23 stations on RockLists, spanning 1987–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, which appears on 74 lists with a best position of #6. The station that charted Meat Loaf most often is Studio Brussel (Flanders, Belgium), with 20 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1993.
Meat Loaf made rock and roll into grand opera and dared you to laugh. Born in Dallas in 1947, he came to records by way of the stage: he was in Hair both on and off Broadway, played two parts in the original Broadway cast of The Rocky Horror Show, and turned up as Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975. So when Bat Out of Hell arrived in 1977, nobody should have been surprised that it sounded like a musical staged inside a hot rod doing a hundred through the night.
That voice was the engine: huge, raw, capable of whispering and bellowing within the same bar, and his live shows were as theatrical as the records. The title track is pure overdrive, "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" slows into a rueful ballad, and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" plays out like a whole rock opera crammed into one song. The album refused to leave: it stayed on the charts for more than 9 years, and as of 2016 was still said to sell around 200,000 copies a year.
America didn't always keep the faith, but Europe did, and Britain and Ireland above all. Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell came roaring back in 1993 with "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)", a towering power ballad that won him the Grammy for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance, and in 1994 the Brits honored him for the best-selling album and single. Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose followed in 2006, and across the 3 albums the saga has moved upward of 100 million copies around the globe.
He never stopped acting either, with more than 50 film and TV roles, among them the bus driver in Spice World in 1997 and Robert Paulsen, a cancer patient, in Fight Club in 1999. He died in 2022, and on the countdowns "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" still steams up the windows.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Meat Loaf on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paradise by the Dashboard Light#342 of all time | 74 | #6 | – | – | |
| 2 | Bat Out of Hell | 26 | #32 | – | – | |
| 3 | Two Out of Three Ain't Bad | 14 | #32 | – | – | |
| 4 | You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth | 12 | #20 | – | – | |
| 5 | I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) | 3 | #5 | – | 1993 | |
| 6 | Paradise by the Dashbo | 2 | #459 | – | – | |
| 7 | You Took the Words Rig | 2 | #513 | – | – | |
| 8 | Two of 3 Ain't Bad | 1 | #171 | – | – | |
| 9 | All Revved Up with No Place to Go | 1 | #637 | – | – | |
| 10 | You Took the Words Right Out of My | 1 | #373 | – | – | |
| 11 | You Took the Words... | 1 | #437 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
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