Songfacts®:

• In this dramatic power ballad, Barbra Streisand greets her unfaithful lover in their darkened bedroom and demands to know the details of his affair. It was written by Jim Steinman, who originally recorded it in a Wagnerian-rock style for his 1981 solo album, Bad For Good.
  
  Steinman also produced Streisand's version for her Emotion album, and it was chosen as the lead single. It only reached #50 on the Hot 100, but peaked at #4 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
• Steinman told Sounds magazine that he wrote the moody track from the perspective of "a teenage Othello," referencing the Shakespearean protagonist who murdered his wife as a result of misguided jealousy.
  
  Starting with a strong visual was a must in Steinman's songwriting process, which also aided him in the creation of Meat Loaf's operatic-rock opus Bat Out Of Hell (1977).
  
  "It's hard for me to write unless I can visualize it in a film or on a stage," he explained in the 1981 interview. "So I'll just make up a whole movie and write the song for that."
• The intro borrows percussive synth elements from another Steinman-produced track: "All Night Long" (1984) by Billy Squier.
• Steinman enjoyed working with Streisand even though she wasn't entirely comfortable singing his song. "Barbra Streisand was great," he told Tower Records Magazine in 1989. "She didn't want to sing some of the lyrics on my song 'Left In The Dark' because they conflicted with her feminist ideals! Amazing voice."
• Meat Loaf, who covered this for his Welcome To The Neighbourhood album in 1995, the follow-up to his Steinman-produced Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell, thought Streisand's version missed the mark. "The first time I heard 'Left In The Dark' I laughed," he said. "I've never heard a song that pointed about jealousy. When Barbra Streisand did it, she just blew right by it."
• Streisand reunited with her A Star Is Born co-star Kris Kristofferson for the music video, where she plays a nightclub singer who discovers her boyfriend in bed with another woman. Directed by Jonathan Kaplan, the big-budget, six-minute clip was Streisand's first video for MTV. Kaplan went on to direct the 1988 drama The Accused, which earned Jodie Foster an Academy Award for Best Actress. Unfortunately his work for Streisand didn't do much for the single or her appeal to the MTV generation.
• Although Emotion is largely regarded as a weak entry in Streisand's discography, it still managed to earn a Platinum certification in the US for selling 1 million copies. For her next album, she went against her record label's wishes and embraced her show-tune roots with The Broadway Album, which went to #1 and sold 4 million copies in the US alone.