"It's All Coming Back to Me Now" is a power ballad written by Jim Steinman. According to Steinman, the song was inspired by Wuthering Heights, and was an attempt to write "the most passionate, romantic song" he could ever create. The Sunday Times posits that "Steinman protects his songs as if they were his children". Meat Loaf had wanted to record the song for years, but Steinman saw it as a "woman's song". Steinman won a court case, which prevented Meat Loaf from recording it. Girl group Pandora's Box went on to record it, and it was subsequently made famous through a cover by Celine Dion, which upset Meat Loaf because he was going to use it for a planned album with the working title Bat Out of Hell III.
Alternately, Meat Loaf has said the song was intended for Bat Out of Hell II and given to the singer in 1986, but that they both decided to use "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" for Bat II, and save this song for Bat III. Steinman at one point offered it to Bonnie Tyler, who was recording her album Hide Your Heart with producer Desmond Child. Confident that it would be a hit, she asked her record company to include it in the album; they declined, citing cost reasons for using Jim Steinman to produce it.
The song has had three major releases. The first version appeared on the concept album Original Sin, recorded by Pandora's Box. It was recorded by Celine Dion for her album Falling into You, and her version was a commercial hit, reaching No. 2 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and No. 3 in the UK Singles Chart. Meat Loaf eventually recorded it as a duet with Norwegian singer Marion Raven for Bat III and released it as a single in 2006. This version reached No. 1 in Norway and No. 2 in Scotland.
A music video was produced for each of the three versions; death is a recurring theme in all of these videos, fitting in with the suggestion in Virgin Records' press release for Original Sin that "in Steinman's songs, the dead come to life and the living are doomed to die".
Inspiration
Influenced by Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights, Steinman compared the song to 'Heathcliff digging up Cathy's corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight', a scene which does not exist in the novel. In this conceptualization, which Steinman imagines having been censored from the book, the strength of Heathcliff's obsession enables a dance with a corpse on the beach despite the West Yorkshire moors being landlocked (and therefore more than the laws of nature would allow):
This isn't the Wuthering Heights of Kate Bush—that little fanciful Wuthering Heights. The scene they always cut out is the scene when Heathcliff digs up Catherine's body and dances in the moonlight and on the beach with it. I think you can't get much more operatic or passionate than that. I was trying to write a song about dead things coming to life. I was trying to write a song about being enslaved and obsessed by love, not just enchanted and happy with it. It was about the dark side of love; about the ability to be resurrected by it... I just tried to put everything I could into it, and I'm real proud of it.
In another interview, Steinman expands on his comments about the song being about the 'dark side of love'.
It's about obsession, and that can be scary because you're not in control and you don't know where it's going to stop. It says that, at any point in somebody's life, when they loved somebody strongly enough and that person returns, a certain touch, a certain physical gesture can turn them from being defiant and disgusted with this person to being subservient again. And it's not just a pleasurable feeling that comes back, it's the complete terror and loss of control that comes back. And I think that's ultimately a great weapon.
The website AllMusic called the song 'a tormented ballad about romantic loss and regret built on a spooky yet heart-wrenching piano melody'. The torment is present in the song's opening ('There were nights when the wind was so cold'), from which the singer recovers ('I finished crying in the instant that you left...And I banished every memory you and I had ever made'). However, the defiance in the verses are replaced by the return of the 'subservient' feelings in the chorus ('when you touch me like this, and you hold me like that...'); this juxtaposition continues throughout the song.