Bonnie Tyler – Holding Out For A Hero

Jim Steinman built it for a tractor-chase scene in a teen dance movie and recycled its instrumental break from one of his own old songs — and it stalled at No. 34 in America before becoming one of the most-licensed power ballads ever made.

For a song that has since soundtracked what feels like half of Hollywood, Holding Out for a Hero had remarkably humble marching orders: it was written to accompany a tractor-chase scene. When Footloose screenwriter Dean Pitchford was assembling the 1984 film’s soundtrack, he wanted a big, galloping number for a specific sequence, and he turned to Jim Steinman — the Wagnerian mastermind behind Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell — to write the music to his lyric. Steinman, in turn, knew exactly who should sing it. He’d just produced a worldwide No. 1 for a Welsh singer with a voice like gravel and velvet, and he put her name forward.

Keep watching: Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart · the other great Steinman epic →

That singer was Bonnie Tyler, fresh off Total Eclipse of the Heart, and the pairing made obvious sense. Pitchford, in interviews, recalled the comic difficulty of even finding her — nobody at Columbia seemed to know who had signed her or where she was, because in America she’d been filed as a country act and her paperwork led to Nashville. Once tracked down, Tyler agreed to record it, and the session took shape at the Power Station in New York, the same studio where “Total Eclipse” had been built, with Steinman producing in his customary everything-at-maximum style.

A hero built for a tractor chase

Steinman being Steinman, the song borrowed from itself: its surging instrumental break was lifted from “Stark Raving Love,” a track on his own 1981 solo album Bad for Good. The finished record is almost all chorus — a breathless, galloping plea for a “white knight upon a fiery steed,” sung by Tyler with full operatic abandon over pounding piano and synthetic thunder. It’s gloriously over the top, and entirely on purpose: a fist-in-the-air rallying cry engineered to make a movie audience’s pulse race during a runaway-tractor showdown. The Western-themed video, with its dry-ice and whip-cracking imagery, leaned into the same melodrama.

And then, in America, it more or less flopped. Despite arriving while the Footloose soundtrack was dominating the charts — the album spent some 24 weeks at No. 1 across 1984 and 1985 — “Holding Out for a Hero” stalled at just No. 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1984 and quickly vanished. For a Steinman composition attached to one of the biggest soundtracks of the decade, it was a genuine surprise, and a disappointment.

The flop that wouldn’t die

What happened next is the real story. The song refused to stay a footnote. Re-released in the United Kingdom in 1985, it climbed to No. 2 — held off the top only by Madonna’s “Into the Groove” — and topped the chart in Ireland; it even re-entered the UK chart again in 1991. More than that, it became one of the most relentlessly licensed songs of its era, turning up in Shrek 2 (in a scene-stealing Jennifer Saunders version), Glee, Short Circuit 2, countless commercials, sporting events, and karaoke nights. A song that couldn’t crack the American top 30 on release became, through sheer cultural ubiquity, far better known than its chart history would ever suggest.

That gap — modest hit, monumental afterlife — is what makes Holding Out for a Hero such a curious entry in Tyler’s catalog. It was never the chart conqueror that “Total Eclipse” was, yet it may be the song more people can sing today, four decades on. Built for a tractor chase, recycled from a B-side’s worth of old ideas, and briefly written off as a miss, it turned out to be exactly the kind of gloriously excessive crowd-pleaser that never really goes away.