Meat Loaf will hit the studio April 15 to record a new album -- the follow-up to 'Bat out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose' -- which will be produced by Rob Cavallo, best known for producing Green Day's smash 'American Idiot.' "We've been talking for almost the last year now," Meat Loaf tells Spinner. "I was waiting for him to finish one project, then I went on tour, and then he was gonna start Dave Matthews, and Dave Matthews was slow. But that's OK."

The waiting time allowed Meat Loaf to pen the material for the album, which he is very excited about. "It's done; we have 28 songs and they won't all go on," he says. "It's a more personal record actually. Still, it's gonna be big -- I'm dramatic and I can't help but be. It'll be the rock record I always wanted."

On This Date in 1993: 'Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell,' by Meat Loaf, flies up to the No. 1 position on the Billboard 200 Albums chart.

The Almanac Advises for October 30: "Many bats are migratory, which means they will make their annual return to warmer surroundings. Other bats prefer to hibernate in dark, warm places instead."

On This Date in 1947: Meat Loaf is born Marvin Lee Aday in Dallas.

The Almanac Advises for September 27: "'Meatloaf is a prime example of comfort food -- that is, familiar meals that people have grown up eating. Usually simple to make, these foodstuffs satisfy feelings of nostalgia or longing in their consumption."

For those of us of a certain age, a happenstance hearing of Meat Loaf's 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light' brings back the 1970s in all its ridiculous, overblown glory. But to hear the song repeatedly, end-on-end, all day long, would be pure torture.

That is what the U.S. military is banking on, evidently, in the War on Terror. In Errol Morris's 'Standard Operating Procedure,' a soldier says that the ear-splitting playback of songs such as Naughty By Nature's 'Hip Hop Hooray' and Metallica's 'Enter Sandman' is a routine part of "futility," the Army's diagram for getting obstinate prisoners to talk. Many detainees can withstand onslaughts of those songs, the soldier says. It's the country music that kills them.

As Alex Ross points out in the New Yorker, Manuel Noriega was bombarded with heavy metal when he barricaded himself inside a Panama City compound in 1989, and the government rained annoying music on David Koresh's followers at Waco a few years later. The practice, apparently, has been stepped up during the current war. "I remember they played Meat Loaf and Aerosmith over and over," reports one former detainee.

Another man, a Pakistani-Englishman who spent time in American prisons at Kandahar and Guantanamo before his 2005 release, has written a memoir. "Once they even played the Bee Gees' 'Saturday Night Fever' soundtrack all night long," recalls Moazzam Begg. "'Hardly,' I thought, 'enough to break anyone I knew.'" What, does he cater weddings for a living?

Other notable instruments of torture, according to an NYU musicologist who is an expert on the subject, have included the relentlessly benign music of James Taylor and the audiobook version of Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo's self-help parody 'Feel This Book.' Most observers, writes Suzanne Cusick, believe that "unwanted" music becomes truly torturous when combined with other interrogation methods, including "nakedness, humiliation, fatigue, and the self-inflicted pain of stress positions."

Funny, that's precisely when we're most likely to slap on the headphones.

Born: Marvin Lee Aday

What's in a Name: The 'Bat Out of Hell' blockbuster's first band was called Meat Loaf Soul; he debuted, oddly, with Motown, as half of a duet called Stoney and Meat Loaf. Recently changed his given first name, which no one knew anyway, to Michael.




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'Two Out of Three Ain't Bad'
--Meat Loaf (1977)

The Kiss-Off: "I want you, I need you/But there ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you"

Writer Jim Steinman wrote this after hearing Elvis' 'I Want You, I Need You, I Love You' on the radio. "Baby, we can talk all night," sings the Loaf, rather sweetly, speaking for all men in relationships. "But that ain't getting us nowhere."
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Fantasy Paradise

A member of 30-plus fantasy football leagues, being an NFL fan is pretty much Meat Loaf's second job. In fact, he told the New York Times that he watches every single NFL game on Sundays, monitors free agent pickings on Tuesdays, calls into NFL radio shows during the middle of the week, sets his lineups on Fridays and watches injury reports on Saturdays.