LI's Jim Steinman wrote 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' for Bonnie Tyler

She was a husky-voiced singer from Wales newly signed to Sony Records. He was a famous producer from Long Island with a knack for writing operatic rock songs. After they met in the early 1980s, Bonnie Tyler and Jim Steinman would create "Total Eclipse of the Heart," a monumental power ballad that rocketed to No. 1 in 1983, sold six million copies and became a karaoke staple for multiple generations.

"I never get tired of singing it," Tyler, who died Wednesday at the age of 75, told the BBC earlier this year. "I love it because everyone can't wait to sing it."

Tyler, born Gaynor Hopkins, grew up in a small South Wales village and sang in local R&B bands as a teenager before being discovered by a talent scout. She idolized raw, ragged singers like Janis Joplin and Tina Turner, though her voice would only come to resemble theirs by accident. In 1977, around the time she began her recording career, Tyler had nodules on her vocal cords surgically removed. During recovery, the story goes, she screamed in frustration and caused permanent damage, but the result was a new voice with a distinctive rasp.

"When I went into the studio they all said, 'Bloody 'ell, where's that voice come from?'" Tyler recalled, according to Yahoo! News. "I now sounded like a female Rod Stewart."

Meanwhile, Steinman, from Hewlett Harbor, had established himself as the creative engine behind Meat Loaf’s "Bat out of Hell," a juggernaut album from 1977 that spawned the hit singles "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" and "Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad" and became one of the bestsellers of all time. Steinman’s songwriting was unusual — part glam-rock, part Broadway, part Richard Wagner — but Tyler felt it might suit her. She asked a producer at Sony to set up a meeting.

There are differing origin stories behind "Total Eclipse of the Heart." One version is that Steinman wrote it as a showcase for Tyler’s unusual voice, according to a 1984 Rolling Stone article posted at Steinman’s official website. Another version is that it was a leftover from an unproduced musical — based on the vampire Nosferatu — and would have gone to Meat Loaf if his voice hadn’t temporarily gone kaput, according to The New York Times. At any rate, Steinman invited Tyler to his Manhattan apartment to run through the song.

It wound up on Tyler’s 1983 album "Faster Than the Speed of Night," also produced by Steinman. A seven-minute opus, it was trimmed to four minutes and 30 seconds for radio — still a relative epic. Arguably, the accompanying video turned the song into a smash. Directed by Russell Mulcahy, whose dozens of credits include The Buggles’ "Video Killed the Radio Star," Duran Duran’s "Rio" and Billy Joel’s "Allentown," the video matched the song’s grandiosity — and then some. Filmed in England’s Holloway Sanatorium, it featured burning candles, floating curtains, flying doves, prep-school boys, rocker dudes, possibly ninjas and Tyler’s blown-out coiffure billowing in an ever-present breeze. "Total Eclipse of the Heart" played endlessly on MTV for what seemed like months.

Steinman scored another hit that same year with his song for Air Supply, "Making Love Out of Nothing at All." He and Tyler would later collaborate on another smash, "Holding Out for a Hero," featured in the 1984 teen dance film "Footloose." He also wrote "Original Sin," a song that was recorded by fellow Long Islander Taylor Dayne in the mid-1990s.

But it’s "Total Eclipse of the Heart" that may have the most lasting legacy. Earlier this year, the song reached 1 billion streams. Tyler expressed delight at the news, according to the BBC.

"I'm really happy, when you think about it, there's only 8.3 billion people in the world," she said. "People just love it."