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31 March 2023
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Interview with ‘Getting So Excited’ songwriter Alan Gruner

“If you don’t go over the top, how are you gonna see what’s on the other side?”

Bonnie Tyler’s blockbuster album Faster Than the Speed of Night is turning 40 later this year. Much of the album’s legacy is built on the success of its lead single, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, but for those who are interested in a deep dive, Faster is a record full of surprises. It captures Jim Steinman’s seven pillars of creation – mixing the feverish with the strong, romantic, violent, rebellious, fun, and the heroic.

A few years ago, we spoke with British musician Alan Gruner about his song, ‘Getting So Exciting’, which features as the third track on the album.

The room’s all set, and our story begins in 1981.

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“I had a couple of one-off single deals in the late 70s and early 80s,” Gruner began. “When I wrote and recorded Getting So Exciting as a demo, curiously enough, no one was interested in it. A fellow musician started playing it with his band, and then Lee recorded it in about ’81, produced by Pete Wingfield.”

(Wingfield is perhaps best remembered for his 1975 hit ‘Eighteen with a Bullet’, and he played keys on Bonnie’s 1979 album Diamond Cut).

Gruner continued, “[Lee] got into the Capital Radio hitline at no. 3 as I recall, and there was a minor buzz about it. Bonnie’s manager got to hear it and said he wanted her to put it on the album.”

In order to ensure that it blended with the other tracks on Faster, Steinman made a few edits to the lyrics, notably changing the title to ‘Getting So Excited’.

Like most songs on the album, ‘Getting So Excited’ has a strong lyrical narrative. Gruner sets the scene with vivid and sexually charged lyrics, as “walls flare up like animated shadows” and “dancers jump like emancipated jackals”. The song’s antagonist, drunken Jimmy, arrives to find his girl getting too close to another man, and the two engage in a bloodthirsty fight.

Gruner said the song was about a “nightmare party”. He added, “I tried to be oblique and clever with some of the wordplay. Lee’s version was faithful to the irony in the lyrics, i.e. the “peanuts knocked on the floor” line. When Steinman got hold of it they obviously wanted to macho it up to go with her leather jacket image.”

It’s not surprising that Jim was drawn to the song. It even features a Steinman-esque, honorary ‘boner line’, when Bonnie sings of a man’s “hankerchief bulge slipping from the middle”.

Despite its merits, ‘Getting So Excited’ struggled to match the success of its counterparts. In the album’s track listing, it has the unenviable task of bridging the gap between two musical goliaths, ‘Faster Than the Speed of Night’ and ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. However, the song has earned its place in rock and roll history through the inclusion of a seemingly throaway line, “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that!”

It is alleged that Bonnie wasn’t comfortable recording it herself, so Steinman stepped in to record the track’s ‘Seductive Female Dialogue’ (as described in the sleeve notes). It took another decade before that short phrase became the title of one of Meat Loaf’s biggest hits.