The Daily Feather – Consumers Not Holding Out for A Hero

In compiling the soundtrack for 1984’s Footloose, which Danielle memorized, screenwriter Dean Pitchford’s goal was diversity, which entailed recruiting seven co-writers and eight artists. Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for A Hero” features in an intense scene where Kevin Bacon is playing a game of chicken on tractors with a local. A “hero” is born not by teenage bravado, but by mistake as his shoelace gets caught on a pedal. He couldn’t jump off, a.k.a., get his “foot loose.” Pitchford wrote this song’s lyrics with the mercurial Jim Steinman, who was responsible for most of Meat Loaf’s hits, including the epic “Paradise By The Dashboard Light.” When Pitchford sought out Tyler for vocals, no one at Columbia Records knew her whereabouts. Tyler’s A&R rep eventually tracked her to Nashville, where she’d signed with a country act. Paired with Steinman, the duo created musical magic. Pitchford recalled the demo to songfacts.com: “(Steinman) was just pounding the s--t out of the keyboard. Everybody was just grooving along as he's pounding and this girl's singing, singing, singing. And at the end of the whole thing, I looked over and there was blood up and down the keyboard. It cut his fingers.”

The fervor with which Steinman hammered the ivories captured onlookers’ perceived improvement in U.S. consumer sentiment through the end of September.