'Total Eclipse of the Heart' and four other essential Bonnie Tyler songs

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Set us as preferred Bonnie Tyler was never afraid to go bigger.The raspy-voiced Welsh singer, who died Wednesday at 75, was best known to pop fans — and to karaoke enthusiasts — for her smash 1983 single “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” an era-defining power ballad that lived up to its dramatic title with a series of escalating musical climaxes.

Yet that wasn’t her only hit to go happily over the top.Here, in the order they were released, are Tyler’s five essential songs.Like a female version of Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” Tyler’s breakout single uses a brisk, jangling folk-rock arrangement to deliver the regrets of a romantic who’s discovered only too late that love makes fools of its believers.

(Stewart himself cut the song three decades later.) Tyler had company on the charts with “It’s a Heartache” in 1978 when Juice Newton and Ronnie Spector released their own versions of the tune written by Ronnie Scott and Steve Wolfe.But the sob in Tyler’s vocal made her recording — a No.

3 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 — the one to weep along with.Originally conceived by the composer Jim Steinman for a musical he was writing about the vampire Nosferatu, Tyler’s signature hit aims for — and achieves — a kind of gothic-Broadway euphoria that’s proved as irresistible to amateur singers as to advertisers, who over the years have put “Total Eclipse” in commercials for everything from beer to laundry detergent to low-cal brownies.To listen today to the song, which spent four weeks at No.

1 and earned a Grammy nomination for female pop vocal performance, is to assume you’ve already absorbed every drop of its melodrama.Lean in, though, and you’ll hear how carefully she’s building toward a feeling of complete abandon.Tyler reteamed with Steinman (who died in 2021) for this pumping synth-rock ...